Gone for Drool

On the eighth day,

someone, not God,

created her drool.

Yes, this poem represents an ode to a woman’s drool,

perhaps the first one in the history

of world literature.

It’s about time.

I remember the first time I saw it.

She snorted with laughter,

there it appeared, drool.

She didn’t know it was there,

no need to wipe it away.

Gone right there.

I’d never seen anything so beautifully haphazard: the hilarious saliva of life.

There’s a name for that. She should invent it.

Now look at us. Here we are.

Thirty-one years later.

There’s no more time to waste.

That’s for procrastinators who have

never walked a salmon-bearing stream on a freshet,

smelled a juniper gin and tonic gurgling downstream.

She told me about her one-tent stands

with biologists in the wild.

There’s a book in them, perhaps even us.

We just have to start living it together.