TRANSCRIPT

I’m Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown. 

Right this moment, so much is knowable. You can Google almost anything, or just ask Alexa. I hear my kids doing that sometimes: Alexa, what’s the Spanish word for catastrophe? What time is it in Australia? Who sings “Funkytown”? Between our phones and our other devices, we have almost any fact at our fingertips. Instantly.

When I was a kid, my parents’ friend Mark was basically their Alexa. This was pre-Internet, so if they wanted to know something—Who was the guy in that movie? What’s the name of that Van Morrison song?—they would pick up the phone and call Mark’s house. The phones back then were all landlines, mind you, because this was the 1980s. If someone wasn’t home, you just couldn’t reach them. 

If my parents were lucky, Mark would be there, and because he was a master of trivia, he’d probably have an answer to their question. Of course there wasn’t a quick way of fact-checking him. They had to trust him, or they had to be reminded of something they already knew but couldn’t access: a movie title, a song lyric, the name of an old classmate or neighbor. 

So much is knowable, but then there’s everything else. Human experience is…slippery. Not everything has an easy answer. This is where poetry really shines—and really comes in handy. If you want a factoid, go to the Internet (or call Mark). If you want a different kind of truth, go to poems.

Poetry doesn’t make our experience less slippery, but I think it helps us get a kind of grip on it. Poetry helps us articulate what we don’t fully understand—the parts of life that are hard to wrap our heads around.

Today’s poem muses on different kinds of knowing without privileging one over the other. What we know vs. what animals know vs. what plants know, for instance. I think of us humans as being on a need-to-know basis, and this poem reminds me that we don’t need to know—or be—everything.

Birthday Wish
by David Groff

The dog doesn’t know he’s a dog
though he knows all he needs 
to know to be a dog.
That tree over there, the one
with two branches conducting
green music, can’t spell
chlorophyll, or chill.
It does not bark like a dog.
The tree knows to shed its coat
when autumn comes, and
the dog senses he sheds
his fur in spring, 
such contrary seasons
unconscious of being seasons
or seasons passing, just as
the dog won’t know when
he’s not a dog, and
the maple won’t comprehend
the hatchet coming,
or the rot, or fire.
May I, like the dog, the tree,
their limbs, their bark,
their barklessness,
the coming fall, the fire, 
the hatchet, and the rot,
know only what I need to be.

“Birthday Wish” by David Groff from LIVE IN SUSPENSE © 2023 David Groff. Used by permission of Trio House Press.