Squirrels with thumbs, bears craving beer, stars with mouths: Mary F. C. Pratt's "Getting Serious" opens like a cartoon and ends like a challenge. Its central idea is that humans are not the finished product of the universe. Intelligence, voice and even divinity may be spreading through everything around us, and we are too pleased with ourselves to notice.
The first three stanzas are written as a news bulletin from a world already in transition. The verbs are mostly present-progressive: coyotes "are gathering," squirrels "are growing," elephants "are learning." Change is happening now, not someday. The squirrels' development is almost a joke, since a few thumbs and tails "like monkeys" are enough to let them "open any door" and "wield paintbrushes and spoons." But the list of what they will do ends on the largest verb: "Soon they will be able to sing." Song matters here because it connects to the stanza about the dead. The "ancient acorn-eating peoples / curled in their river-gravel mounds" are "arising and tuning their drums." The poem doesn't name them, and it doesn't need to. The image of bodies curled in the ground, then waking, gives the animal uprising the feel of a resurrection. It is the past and the wild returning together.
The poem also builds a chain through its images. "Gathering" first describes coyotes with acorns, then returns for Dark Matter, which is "gathering, / incomprehensible, into a god of infinite / dimension." The same word covers the smallest act of foresight and the largest cosmic process, and the line break splits "infinite" from "dimension," as if the sentence can't be contained on the page. Then "All the stars are opening / their pointed mouths" echoes the squirrels' coming song. The whole sky seems to be drawing breath.
At the fourth stanza the tone shifts. "Is this so strange?" is the poem's hinge, and the answer comes in two short, plain sentences: "Once there was a spirit / in every tree. Once / all the animals could speak." The repeated "Once" works against the repeated "Soon" earlier. The poem suggests that the strange thing is not a talking animal but our own forgetting. Then it turns on the reader with the sharply comic "stubby primate, / secure in illusions of grace." "Stubby" shrinks us physically, and "grace" quietly borrows the language of religion and elegance, only to call it an illusion.
The final two stanzas deliver the promised seriousness. "Your brain extends through the soles / of your feet and beyond / the thickness of your skull" pushes against the idea of a sealed-off, private mind. Instead it "mingles with the shards / scattering into cosmic curves." Judging by "moving faster, heaven knows why," the universe in question is one whose motion is speeding up, and the speaker admits that no one can say why. Even "heaven" is used only as a shrug. Evolution continues "outside your blindfold," a phrase that turns our ignorance into something we have put on ourselves. The last image is consciousness as a "homunculus," the old idea of a tiny person living in the head to do the watching and thinking. The poem calls it "that ancient soul that no one's ever found." It doesn't end on an answer. It leaves the search for the soul unfinished, which fits its argument.
Formally, the poem is free verse in six six-line stanzas, with no rhyme and an uneven, conversational rhythm. Enjambments such as "One day / there will be enough" and "Even now, / the ancient…" give a feeling of things arriving just as the sentence turns. The title is partly a joke, because the early stanzas seem unserious, and partly a warning that the joke was serious all along. Humor is how the poem gets past our defenses.
Its significance lies in this combination of science and myth. Dark Matter, evolution and an accelerating universe sit beside talking animals and tree spirits, and the poem treats them as equally strange. That balance is what makes it worth reading. It doesn't scold the reader, and it doesn't claim to know more than it does. It asks whether anything we think we understand has been understood at all.