"MINNOWS" BY JOHN DONLAN

So… unlikely: so many feet above
the lake, in ponds filled with nothing but rain
minnows are springing half a finger length
out of the water, little Gothic windows

flashing and sinking back into rings of ripples.
How did they get here? -- How did any of us?
A biologist friend explains they must have climbed
the tiny streams whose dry black beds run inches deep

in spring and fall; or birds may have dropped them –
poetic beginnings, romantic but scientific.
Until she said they’d be there I never saw them.
What else lives in there? A lifetime couldn’t learn them all

yet once there wasn’t a single living thing
on earth: chemicals, complex mixes, lightning, and
something began remaking itself, stubborn,
creeping like happiness across the landscape.

October 5, 2006


	Minnows