meristem

[fleur_de_soleil]

all summer it was maize.
it was the way it rolled into flour on your back teeth, starchy, pearly,
your mouth a grinding mill, mechanical and arrhythmic, some ancestral
machine for small civilizations within your gut.

it was something that grew as tall as a man and taller, to feed your children
something that wilted without rain and held its odd
stilted grip in the dusty red soil.

and suddenly,
in a porcelaincool lab
full of carl zeiss optics and chemicals with names
like renaissance paint
[carmine indigo violet gentian spill out of small eye droppers
their scent less more of a pungent back of the nose burning]

delicately cutting and smearing root
tips
onto glass
when i noted, here, while we were struggling against the rain
are the chromosomes, of this maize, of this cultivated thing
we know intimately
like the taste of our own mouths in the morning
this monitored and evaluated dusty Old Aztec
small, bound with other proteincontraptions, silently, dividing.
spreading into the riotous prophase
the military precision of metaphase from ancient book micrographs
proven false by their somehow jumble
into the elegant dancing away of anaphase
.
the root tips.
dividing.
quietly.