Dad takes out the microscope
from a dusty old suitcase
and sets it up on the kitchen table.
Once again I’m six years old
and we are living near the lake
where he takes me out with a net and a vial
to collect the water together.
He shows me how to make a slide,
how to focus the lens, how to steady
my eye and how to be patient
and wait for the tiny world
to reveal itself.
My son and daughter are with us
today, and he takes them out
to the waterway with the net
and the vial and all their curiosity.
I’d forgotten how miraculous it feels
to look into a droplet and find
a universe with slender strands
and tiny spiraled globs of green
and all the unseen critters seen,
their eyeless, mouthless,
heartless forms nudging
at the algal threads or speeding
across and off the slide.
How big the world seems then,
and how very, very small—
how hard it is to know
where we fit into it all—
this world with its car bombs
and militant groups, adventure
movies and evening news,
Jupiter high in the springtime sky
and under the microscope,
single-celled things zooming
and worming and meandering.
Who could make sense of it?
How simple to be one of these
small creatures I can’t name,
how simple it was to be that girl,
six years old, beside her father
on the microscope bench
dropping beads of water
onto the slides, kneeling on her chair,
mesmerized.
It’s a great narrative, the remembering pushed up against the present. I love stanzas 6-9, the expansion of such a small world. Two small notes from me: I can’t tell because of the placement of the word “together” in stanza 3 where you are referring to the two of your together or bringing the water together. Also, just for a ponder, you might have a stronger ending, I think, if you ended on the word “enthralled” rather than that summary-like phrase “with what she was learning about the world.” An excellent excellent story.
A matter of taste, likely, but I rather than “enthralled,” which seems too strong and evocative to end such a dreamscape, perhaps, “mesmerized”?
“how to steady//my eye and how to be patient/and wait for the tiny world/to reveal itself.” I’m _still_ learning steady and patiently wait.
I love the addition of, “and their curiosity” to your dad’s taking the grandkids, this time. ”
“To see the universe in a grain of [water].”
yes fellers … so right about the end. it was one of those ones where the next morning i woke up and read it and thought, “that’s the end?”
thanks for the assist … I’ll get on it!