extra sensory perception

Greetings, Poetry People! You know how your TBR stack (physical or virtual) gets so deep you've forgotten what's in it? I went casting around in Audible to see what I had available to read and found AN IMMENSE WORLD by Ed Yong, a book about how animals have sensory "umwelten" that humans have, essentially, only just begun to think of understanding.

This coincides with the arrival home of my college-aged son, who is now a bio/psych major instead of a psych/bio major and who knows just an avalanche of fascinating facts about animal and mycological life.  This is a kid whose phone contains, among the various culture memes and plenty of music, a graphic of the life cycle of slime molds, which he describe as like a "Choose Your Own Adventure" book. (MEANWHILE, by Jason Shiga, was a seminal text in our house.)

Meanwhile, I'm trying to write a poem a day this month using quotes and phrases overheard and overread as starting points.  Here's the first inspired by AN IMMENSE WORLD:

Thanks to our host today, dear Robyn over at Life on the Deckle Edge! Bonus Mother's Day photo: me, my mom, my daughter.

Rehoboth Beach, Nov. 2015

Bonus music connection for anyone still reading: "Senses Working Overtime" by XTC.

npm2020: poetry videos day 20 "Cauldron Full of Compost"

My National Poetry Month Project 2020 is to record a short video each day in April, presenting my published poems to poetry lovers of all ages.

Today's poem is the first in a series for Earth Week. It's the 50th anniversary of Earth Day on Wednesday, and I'll be sharing some poems like this one, with some extra-earthy themes.  Also possibly my longest poem...

Cauldron Full of Compost I’m raking for dollars when I find it— my red kindergarten lunch box, buried deep under leaves and tangled ivy between the playhouse and the herb garden. I guess plastic really does last forever. I fixed a lot of food in this lunch box: boiled summer cauldrons full of onion-grass spaghetti, mixed pans of mudluscious spring brownies, scooped great heaping mountains of snow cream sprinkled with sugar, garnished with icicles. And once, on Uncle Mark’s birthday, I filled it with oozing mulberries and tiny wild strawberries tossed with encourage-mint. Everyone ate that for real. Who knows what I last cooked in here? Now nature’s doing the brewing: a dark sludgy soup, a decomposing mess of dead plants laced with worms. A few of the leaves are new enough— I can tell which are walnut, tulip, maple— But most have moldered here so long they’re part of the primeval stew. I stir it with a wooden spoon gone greenish with moss, drag up a dripping clump, spread it wetly at the foot of the maple, richer and thicker than syrup. With this dead soup I feed the tree.