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The Sponge

By Joshua Mehigan b. 1969 Joshua Mehigan

None of us understands our story better

than this nonentity, unconscious slip

of nature, nonetheless our common parent

dilating at the bottom of the sea.

The parent, too, of octopus and pony,

of reefs and villages, once it was strange

simply for being not a rock itself—

not rock, but a blank sleep on a rock shelf.

And, deeply sympathetic to the rock,

to sea and sea-dust washing through its skin,

it knows, although it doesn’t know it knows,

that minds and their milieux are all one thing.

Some see its way of thinking; most, not yet.

Still, one day, just by living, all will find

reason enough within themselves to think

the single thought forever in its mind.

Source: Poetry (June 2006).

Biography

Poet Joshua Mehigan grew up in upstate New York and received a BA from Purchase College and an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. Influenced by the poetry of Philip Larkin, Jorge Luis Borges, and Edgar Bowers, Mehigan writes intelligent, morally complex lyric poems shaped by a nuanced attention to rhyme and meter. Critic Adam Kirsch praised The Optimist in a review for the New York Sun, observing, “Mr. Mehigan is Frost-like in . . .

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