Idle Water Thoughts

By Sy Roth

they hack through the earth’s core
machines biting it,
slipping their long pipes into the aquifer
squirreling through thin layers to find water
mussing lush patches of her
lusting for her water.
I’m thirsty.

a dog pees against the cobblestones,
its owner tapping his foot
whistling a you-don’t-see-me tune
I conjectured—
at the seemingly endless flow, and
the dog’s ahhhhh grin
as his urine burden splashes.
an idle thought wiggles in
traipsing through for a playful second—
I see a Tyrannosaurus Rex behind my eyes
and I watch him pee
lifting his huge leg,
evacuating his bladder–
how much water would he produce?
a lake?
fill a cairn?
I think.

I imagined the waters of millions of Tyrrani
filling reservoirs.
I watch their water seep into the soil
and leak into yellow cisterns for millennia.
perhaps the waters of those gothic beasts
nourish us today,
we being blessed
by the nurturing waters of the gargantuas.
My thirst slaked.

final observation—
that dog scratches at the ground with its hind paws,
marches snappily behind its owner
unconcerned that he could
be hydrating future generations
the corers, as well, still pierce
unwittingly.
I laugh.

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A Tenuous Hold

By Sy Roth

Saucily independent petals purple the dawn.
Hazy visions encircle it in a verdant field.
It whispers its song written on foolscap,
existence unmarred momentarily by their skulking encroachment.
It scents the air with floral-flatulent hauteur.

A dog sniffs it.
Content that it intends no harm, he passes it by.
Languidly proud,
it encourages the wind’s light caress,
and answers in a princessly twist of her hand.
An unctuous slug is permitted to leave a vitreous trail
as it glides the green mile of its hirsute underbelly.

Boisterous picnickers arrive
and they smell nothing
but charcoal briquets and lighter fluid
that will sear their hamburgers and frankfurters.
They march lockstep,
a column of ants, blind to it and
its tenuous tethering to the earth,
spread a red-checkered blanket over it,
smother it in a sunless canopy,
pound its leaves into the ground,
weigh it down under a picnic-basket ingot,
smash it with their undulating buttocks,
extinguish its scent,
and erase its existence.

Weeds trek in when the light returns–
in batches of squalor to absorb it.
They saturate the air with chlorophyll breath
and anchor themselves to the soil.

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