The Poetry Cottage is so, so wonderful.
Thank you.
I actually organized my reading more than I usually do.
So I got to just stand in the little living room area
and think about all this.
"The Blob."
In 1896, nearly 50 years after Melville's masterpiece,
three years before Freud's dream, and my grandpa's journey
across the Pacific, a storm shoved seven tons of white blob
onto a St. Augustine shore, 23 monstrous feet
of glistening flesh, a surviving outcast or alien or devil
of the deep.
Chunks were immediately shipped to the nascent Smithsonian
for display then storage.
Until, 100 years later, a Florida scientist
examined the same specimen as well as new blobs
floated up from the depths, declaring
the cryptozoological curios merely the remains
of large cetaceans.
The narrative of the stupefying has closed with nothing
more than pure collagen washed up
from the oceans, unconscious, sad to say.