The Wonder of Small Things

my wife wakes me at 4AM.
dreaming of tragedy, I gather
all my attention, sit up to listen.
 “There’s a little creature 
sleeping in my yellow towel,” 

she whispers, as if we might wake it 
thirty feet below and on her studio
porch, the place she owns almost
entirely in a world that sometimes
lurches, seldom meets its promises,

sometimes kills. I pull on shorts and
follow. we have this right with each
other, to share discovery wherever
it startles us. I remember the night
she sang a small cotillion of southern

toads right up to us, the February we 
followed mating pairs of purple
salamanders all along our creek,
a season we watched the yellow
Argiope above our transom as she courted 

with her mate and folded a thousand eggs
into a silken sheet which she hung behind her
before she desiccated. So much more,
a daily wonder. A grace. We walk the narrow
porch to see what it might hold, enfold:

a tiny, speckled wren, feathers puffed 
against the first cold night, hanging
inside a fold of cloth which she gathers 
around her, head under wing, inside a
temporary necessary shelter, breathing.

Gary Phillips was the 2016-2019 poet laureate of Carrboro, North Carolina. He lives in a rammed earth house in Silk Hope, North Carolina. A child of Appalachia, Gary reads poetry and Afro-Futurism, studies amphibian activities on full moon nights  and was once a commissioner in Chatham County. His book of poetry and occasional pieces, The Boy The Brave Girls was printed in 2016 by Human Error Publishing (Wendell, Mass).