Gary McDowell
Poetry
Gary McDowell is the author/editor of eight books, most recently Aflame (White Pine Press, 2020) and Caesura: Essays (Otis Books, 2017). His poems and essays have appeared recently or are forthcoming in journals such as The American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, The Nation, The Southern Review, The Laurel Review, West Branch, and The McNeese Review. He is Professor of English at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee.
Aliens Wrapped in Ravioli
My son just ran into the kitchen to show me
a picture on his phone. Newly born stingrays.
Don’t they look like aliens wrapped in ravioli?
he says. The sunlight slides down the living
room walls, and the robins and mourning
doves peg grubs and worms from the freshly
mown lawn. But he’s right, they do. There is
almost the entirety of the world in him. He
thinks he knows everything, as we all do when
we’re newly learning how much there is to know,
but to move into consciousness, he needs
to talk, hear himself say the things he’ll one day
understand are buttresses to deeper, more
considered understandings. It’s not that he’s
wrong. Humans have been wrong for as long
as we’ve been human. The world is flat. Earth
is the center of the universe. Fire is brought
by the gods. Death is unnatural, accidental,
avoidable. For the first time in my life, I saw
a bird—a bluejay, last fall, dusk nipping at
the afternoon—drop from the persimmon
like a stone lobbed into a pond, but rippleless.
“
Kids really do say the damnedest things. Birds really do drop dead from trees. Baby stingrays really do—a quick Google Image search proved it—look like aliens wrapped in ravioli. Humans really do think we know things about the natural world. Also, we don't know a damn thing. It is this interstitial space of knowing/not-knowing that, I think, all of my poems explore. This poem is an extension of my morbid curiosity about how much I'll simply never know and the endless quest to narrow that gap.
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