Entering the Genome
Someone stumbled
into a middens in Mississippi,
a hook and a twist
of what looked like fiber.
*
They found a bone under an Alpine glacier,
a gift of global warming.
*
Under a parking lot in Leicester,
the maligned spine
of the last Plantagenet.
*
The DNA comes back
whispering secrets
you can’t connect
to anything you know.
*
Unless it’s the whole
swollen passage
of human history.
*
Though maybe, too,
the part that one day
wandered away
into another life form,
a different curl-de-sac,
swarming with grubs and bits of bark
living under rocks
in the Gobi Mountains,
which are now a high flat desert.
*
Or the worm that found a way
to break
into a molecule of snow
and suck its marrow dry.
*
And, too,
may never be discovered,
never known.
*
Which is, after all,
only a human thing.
* * * * *
Dirge for a Dying Barn
They call it the middle distance in books
about looking, but this was Connie and Will’s barn.
It’s gone. Clawed to the ground over
three days in May by a spindly backhoe.
You could hear bones crunching across the field.
I wanted this barn to be always falling,
frozen in going down, with a light wind
soughing across the grass bearing the scent
of rust, hand-made nails, and locally planed
planks cut from trees dead loggers spat on.
It made a way, a quick way, of looking
at most matters first thing in the morning
as marginal but gritty, permanently
transforming under the pressures of light,
then dark, and then, slowly, the light again.
If there is a kind of lamentation
or way to thank the feral cats, the mice,
this place for which a small white owl is named,
the many moanings of the suffering roof,
desiccated shakes covered in rusted tin,
I cannot think of the anthem, hymn,
or ritual, the utterance or wail,
high-pitched enough or long-lasting enough, so,
send a hissed yessss to the wild grape and vine
that wrapped it every summer in its leaves.