Issue 16
Winter 2004
R. Paul Craig
R. Paul Craig teaches Philosophy at San Jacinto College, near Houston. He has publised in a number of poetry journals, such as Poet Lore, Snow Monkey, Angel Hair, Peloris, 2River View and Red River Review, among others. He has also published two chapbooks: The Higher Criticism (Adams Press) and Every Once in a While (Scars Publications). He lives in Friendswood, Texas with his wife, two children and a little dog.
Evolution
Ignorant of human foibles,
follies, the yard was enhanced,
enchanted by the glowing dusk.
Bathed in a luminescent butter-
yellow light,
everything had a
magnified importance, like a
museum piece, precious, beautiful,
unique. Love for landscape colors,
smells momentarily lapsed, stopped
illusion, like a transfusion. A king-
fisher rat-a-tatted by. Peepers and
crickets commenced their evening
song. Sweet puppy clouds and the
darkening mauve sky shown. Tiny
mosquitoes floated through the
last light. Tree leaves were paralyzed
by an airless crescendo of mood. The
earth, captured for a moment, its heart
revealed.
Absolute silence governed the earth, as
if somewhere, somehow, sometime the
first oxygen-breathing fish was emerging
from the sea to crawl about clumsily. It
gulped in an initial breath of air and filled
out fledgling lungs. Like that.
The Past
is always viewed
pejoratively, like
it's inferior to
the future.
At any rate,
less important.
Nobody's ever
condemned for
looking forward.
We're told to.
It's only back
that's back-
there, never
to arrive at,
again. It's
done, accomplished,
just happened.
But
our lives
are in the
past, not
the future.
The past
is where
life takes
shape, like
a transparency.
Somewhere ahead,
near or far,
is the end.
But behind,
shrouded in
clouds of
forgetting,
lies the beginning.