Late Autumnal, with Cockroach

Morning thick with inscrutable dinge;

another season drained. I’m watching

the pest control man fill the rat bait

station, black attaché of poison hidden

in the hedge.

                And while I pay a monthly

bill for him to do my killing, still

it seems miraculous, how much insists

on surviving, despite us. What grinds it

out. What hustles simply to continue.

                Like this plumply enormous

roach, its carapace the molten brown of

topaz, tooled cannily to fold into a ceaseless

package: look at it now collapsing to fit exactly

between my deck’s wooden slats.

                No matter what unspeakable

agents we devise for it to carry to its nest,

there comes a calm in knowing there will always

be an awful, inexorable more of something,

other than us, to crawl or slither, gnaw & be

gnawed; a peaceful certainty of moreness,

creeping through our filth to greet what’s

coming soon.

                Unloved, ingenious creatures,

the few truly diligent, whom we can never

drive off or annihilate completely, this poem

remembers you, waiting in our unplugged

cracks & fuming sewers, seeing the relentless

engines you’ve willed yourselves to be, the valor

of your tidy & despised machinery.