By Susan Blackwell Ramsey

for Ursula Vernon 

The caption reads, in its entirety, 
 “The kelp root serves no absorbent function. 
It serves only as an anchor.” Only. 

Well, pardon kelp roots for doing one thing well,
 for not multitasking, for failing to walk 
the center line, backward, on one foot, juggling plums.  

You’d think anchoring a keystone species might be enough. 
 Those amber cathedrals swaying toward the light 
are able to harbor, nourish, filter because 

of single-minded, undistracted roots 
 who have mastered their craft, anonymous, 
remarkable only for sticking to one job. 

Some of us ultra-absorbers frankly envy 
 those kelp roots. They never feel compelled 
to tell perfect strangers why Charles Steinmetz 

was more brilliant than Nikola Tesla, and by the way 
 had friends who called poker night “The Society 
for the Redistribution of Salaries.” No kelp root 

ever burned with retrospective shame 
 at having delivered a monologue on Sham, 
the second-fastest horse to run the Derby, 

losing to Secretariat by a third
 of a second and who has dwindled to a footnote 
though no horse ever ran that fast again. 

Sure, it’s rough to be passed over, your one talent
 for tenacity dismissed as merely stolid, 
but it is preferable to being the frog 

chomping water beetles who realizes
 ”she’s swallowed a Regembartia attenuate 
again, feels it resist digestion, walking 

steadily through her convoluted gut, and knows 
 from experience that the beetle’s going to stroll 
irresistibly into another day. 

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Susan Blackwell Ramsey’s work has appeared, among other places, in The Southern Review, 32 Poems, Poetry Northwest, and Best American Poetry; her book, A Mind Like This, won the Raz/Shumaker award. She lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan.