Tag Archives: evolution

The big Was

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First, the big Was, expanding suddenly
Too quick to glow, too far to measure
Like blood coagulates, in lumps, relentless

Blind recognition yearning to recombine
Into the breadth-less infinite, one by one,
Across the fleeing everness

It was the lumps, after all, without them
Nothing is born, nothing dies
The lumps, flailing, contact and contract

Lend each other mass and meaning
Become vast in becoming spent
In the large and slow entropic resistance

Fragments of causation forgoing randomness
Blinding recapitulation, a first worm wriggles
Your father, my son, your mother, too

Born in that salty swilling dawn
Descending on down time’s narrow tunnel
Until all that’s left is dawn

Moi

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Here I sit
Just a big lump of protoplasm
Encased in plant fiber and animal hide
No more purpose or meaning
Than a slime mold

No, a slime mold
Is at least interesting
Assembling and disassembling
To suit the moment

Bright yellow
Daring any living thing
To do something about it

Daring me
To be more than that
Or at least
That

Free will

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What parts of me lie buried in unstoned ground
Dreams and fears alike leached out
Into the indifferent clay?

What parts of what I am pleased to call
My own invention come down
Through the ancient crossfire of nature and nurture
To the ultimate epi-me,
Striding vainly along memory’s boulevards
Grasping at the heart of things?

Isn’t that, too, some determinate of blood and soil?
Of circumstance stenciled onto a genetic landscape,
Long fixed, long before I thought to uncover it?

Go back far enough, and we are all progeny
Of blind, pointless chemical replication,
Some accident of electromechanical impulse
Upon a sludge.

Snow, again

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Unbidden, it comes all the same
Without malice, unaware and uninterested
In our dreams or desires

Without even innocence
Its promise of sweet seclusion
Sequestered beneath the pale sameness

Dissolving in the salty mired streets
White and gray in a death spiral
A love embrace unlike any

Seen since the last snowfall
What may be, what could be
Belong to the feckless air

Oh, I can dream, all right
But only until recalled
By bickering gulls

Geese barking orders,
Or the shrill outrage of the
Woodpecker’s call

A field mouse trips nervously
Across an ice dam
Vultures patrol the freeway

Food from top to bottom
Interested only in replication
The slaughter of millions

But a byproduct of procreation
So long as enough survive to breed
Or not, and even then,

Some beast waits anxiously in the wings
For just enough change
Just enough opportunity

And still, falls the snow.

Genealogy II

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Somehow, a mitochondrion wormed its way
Into our native beast, and, having found shelter,
Settled in.

We have twisted it to our liking,
Harvesting its life energy,
Binding it to ourselves

Like an indentured child
Harvesting the boundless sunlight
For a wizened mole.

Those walls have long since dissolved,
But part of us still seeks
The primitive new,

The strange echo of mutation,
The protean coil,
That entwines alien virtues.

But for every meld there is a sever,
How can I embrace you
If we have become one?

And for every sever there is a mending.
And so we spin and part our helix
Until end becomes beginning.