Crickets

A Great Green Bush Cricket, a Clioniona Spider, and a Beetle

A poem is scratching at my door, waiting to be let in.
“Keats studied anatomy,” it chirrs, without stopping
its scratch. I say I’m too tired, won’t play. “Tennyson
walked 20 miles a day, or was that Coleridge?” Hoping

it’ll hush, I say I don’t know, and there’s silence. Now
my attention is fixed on the absence of sound—save
for the fridge and fluorescents’ sotto voce hum, how
quiet it’s got. I sit for minutes, ages, eons, wish I gave

in, had opened the door, wish I could turn about
and touch its spiky rhymes, hear its meter click across
the floor. …chirrup: “Physiological poetics!” It’s lost,
the poem scratching at my door, hoping to be let out.