To be taken seriously as a poet, sometimes you have to swim into deeper waters, reckon with the whichness of what and unscrew the inscrutable.
Digging into Metaphysics
What makes humans human–image
of God? Featherless biped? What?
Some say “the animal that laughs”–
but now we know that apes laugh,
and that cats smirk, if not chuckle.
Language?–talk to the chimps.
On the darker side, other creatures
also eat their own and make war.
As I lean on my shovel, it comes to me
that none of God’s creatures but humans
will dig rocks out of a field all day long.
What this says about our position on
the evolutionary ladder, I can’t say.
But porpoises and whales gave up
on hands and feet to go back to sea.
I think they got tired of digging.
