(no subject)
this doesn't have a name because it's another ones of those poems that i wrote in
20 minutes instead of paying attention to microbial ecology (but it's late and i'm tired, and those are my excuses.)
(post title -- in fact, i'm stuck in this class until 9:50, someone help me. )
it's somewhere between the shelf
where college textbooks rest aslant
and a produce crate holding rows of
old honey jars with clots of sugar
beneath their lids and dried combs
that retain their mechanical geometry.
it sits in a terracotta pot.
oregano-maybe, or mint.
i've never been so good at telling
them apart unless their oil is trapped
in the rivets of my fingertips, and anyway,
the only part i'm interested in is the bundle
of undifferentiated cells at the growing tip;
all the incidental art of cell division, prophase,
anaphase, the delicate language of nucleic acids,
and the way they speak and speak,
quietly at first, in unfathomable
sequences of amino acids, and then
louder;
until they can tell the story of the day you took
the wooden walkway over an algal-green river
and watched an anhinga's slender neck move
through a sawgrass prairie with the hand
of another human being tracing the whorls
of skin on your palm.
it must be that;
the thing that makes my lungs feel rigid
and useless.
it's all there; the white bridges carpeted
by spanish moss and the taste of black soil,
epitaphs and wild psalms,
trapped in the meristem
of a petal of maybe-oregano.