The Earthworms’ Rainy Springtime Deaths

The Earthworms’ Rainy Springtime Deaths

I.
In the Aprils showers that in Vermont
have extended to May, I see them on
morning runs, vying for dirt, slithering
with mixed purpose on the pavement, most of
them alive, but some are either squished or
severed in half.  I do try, honestly
I do, to avoid them, but I’m sure my
shoes, unintentional accessories
to the crime, have felled a few.  They are pink
and brown and sometimes a somewhat reddish
gray, all of them soaked as I loop back to
my apartment, the converted funer-
-al home.  Days later, sometimes, if the rain
lets up, they will be there, dehydrated
versions of their former selves, stuck to the
sidewalk, accidental, anorexic
peppers, or, if there is no reprieve from
the rain, they fall victim to cars or bikes
or passers by, before bloating signi-
-ficantly to a quite unpleasant end.

II.
And I think back to seventh grade science,
taught by a strange woman who did yoga
and talked about peeing on plants somewhere
in India (“It’s good for them!” she then
explained to a gawking class), as we learned
about the earthworm, we were all in a
state of disbelief when we discovered
that they could not regrow if they were cut
in half, given that we had just witnessed
something like that happen with another
animal (brown, slimy, lived in water)
in our petri dishes two weeks before.
We listened as Miss Develeskis told
us why, during rainfall, they tended to
surface, citing moisture, oxygen, and
other elements, I’m sure, then noting,
with little sign of remorse, that these side-
-walk adventures and pavement promenades,
owing to the way they breathe, resulted
with near certainty in their untimely
demise, their surfacing merely a short
purchase on life, driven from the under-
-world up into the less amenable
conditions of our own existence.  “So
the earthworms are basically committing
suicide, then?” asked a classmate and friend.
Miss Develeskis chewed on the question
for a bit, before replying:  “I guess
you could say that, yes.”  We stared back at her.

III.
Then it happened that I was a student
down the street, in a renovated high
school that opened late upon my entry,
when, once in my second year and once in
my third, I learned from classmates the news that,
in the springtimes consumed by tests, and sports
and part-time jobs, in our small, safe town com-
-posed of small, safe families, two earthworms
in the form of young men my age had, as
green lawns came back to life and the daylight
extended past the afternoon, as a
result of the raindrops of school bus taunts
and unrequited love, and of the weight
of the Baptist Church, and having to leave
student government and soccer behind
(respectively), climbed above the soil
of their daily grind, and out the windows
of their bedrooms, to be recovered at
a later time by their own species, up-
-on returning home from work, shocked at the
spectacle that they were forced to behold.