Odes to Science

 

Ode to Science 7 (Ode to Evolution ) 1. Even if I did photograph the new wrinkles on my hands, it won’t stop leaves crumbling though empty time. A least my babies hands look a little like mine ----that is some consolation. The lunar eclipse I saw  Aug. 27th 2007 a few weeks ago showed me concretely that the earth spins around the sun--- since I could see the shadow of the earth pass over the slowly-turning-crimson-moon. The eyelid of a lizard blinks tearlessly. Flower petals under moonlight, are like the closed eyelids of snow leopard. I have felt the huge rocks of Southwest Wyoming lift up their heads like giant Iguana and reveal an underbelly of mouth opening sandstone red as a throat of gulleted terracotta. Face paint serves a purpose like the red gula pouches of Frigate Birds, red and blue Mandrill Butts  look like blue and red Mandrill Faces from far away. Perfect  replicas of Owl eyes or Monkey faces look out of Butterfly  an Moth with no one being able to e explain exactly how they got there. Natural selection’s amazing artistry is far older and better drawn than Chauvet caves. Let's value Manikin Dances, Turkey Wattles or Chameleon skin as much as Rembrandts.

Eclipse fo the moon, Aug 27, 2007

 

Turkeys Mating Dancing March 2007
 

We are alive here on the earth,
seemingly still as pitcher plants
yet that is an illusion---
because earth is always shifting
and sliding over molten pools.
I recently saw geysers,
‘Artist’s Paint Pots’, and other places in Yellowstone,
boiling a palette of primary blood oranges
sulphuric ochres, beryl blues.
Our humble beginnings are in
Cyanobacteria and thermophiles,

Life originated in these rainbow hued steam vents in a boil of starry elements, amino acids and heat. Blue green algae created most of the world’s oxygen Sunshine and cell patterns precede creation myths. Life is not the creation of fictional gods but of colored minerals, sun and calderas. These prismatic springs Burned rainbows into the corners of my eyes and I look godless into the sad and steaming future like a Midnight Chameleon about to burst into a flame of meteor showers raining stars over ancient jungles.

 

Thermophile mats in the Grand Prismatic Spring. Yellowstone National Park, Sept. 07

 

Crater Lake, Oregon, Golden Mantled ground Squirrel (2007)

2. Bloody toothed T-Rexes might seduce you into natural history museums but sensationalism is not what evolution is about. Evolution is the hump of the buffalo or the split lip of lamas and Guanacos the ring shaped brains of star fish my own fingernails or my longing for my wife. Crater Lake blew its top off only 7000 years ago. How the galaxies turn in their spirals is one thing, but that does not yet explain tree fern spores on sand grains. Does my small finger relate me the three toed sloth, who doesn’t have one? I need to think a lot about this to understand bodies. Bryzazoa colonies, Radiolaria, Jelly fish, Horse bodies, Horseshoe crab bodies, cat bodies, human bodies, bilateral symmetry, dendritic patterns of veins and arteries--- what are bodies about? Splayed sections of an orange ooze seeds. What relates the throb in my head to Watermelons--- to water pouring off cliffs-- or to thermophile bacteria on under-sea vents? My fingernails know baking deserts and my cheeks flowering rabbit brush. Eyes are plush mosses gone crystal. Most life has to keep moving, if we want to live. What cooling molten earth crust we live on floating plates over seas of lava, shaking subduction zones. We unconsciously quiver while sleeping, the mind racing unknown to itself quick as hagfish on the deep sea bottom. Snakes pause and then move under grasses, the osprey clutches a fish glistening sliver--- ---Think and feel it though--- like Lichens we can stay in one place for centuries, eons…. if the families will only remain--- but nothing is static, even the self I thought I was 10 years ago is largely gone, It is true that life opposes entropy since reproduction is all about not being killed right away by time. DNA trumps time, twists against the spiraling of galaxies, fights to keep the children alive. Yes, what a marvel of stiff emerald or ruby strength holds up the primordial dragonfly still hovering today over the Jurassic pond?

Egg sack ( slug or salamander ?)     Cherry Faced Meadowhawk or Flame Skimmer? Dragonfly

 

3. A half hour after my mother died I felt her cold forehead and then gave her a hug and her back was still warm, all the warm blood still pooling there. Days later, her poor bones burned into ashes, looked sandy still and the hush of her absence cast dead time over my silent wishes  that maybe she could live just a little longer. ---- life after death is a lie I realized in the look of my dead mother’s eyes ---only species survive--- How fragile our bodies are and how we float in the world like jellyfish, membranes of cells quivering so vulnerable, and always moving to stay alive in spite of space, in spite of the press and downward pull of a cold universe. Come then, and touch softly this tingle of gelatinous being--- this flesh that is all there is the delicious hope of the sex act that takes place in mind and body free of Christian lies gravity and decayed corpes?

Pelagia colorata Medusa Jellyfish (2006)

 

The marvel of evolution flows from fern fingers spreading spores
to my spread fingers open as a fan of bright flowers
and my glad smile,  blond as golden Tamarins.
What a marvel is evolution, this painful prism of glory,
this rainbow array of threatened
beings who want to be safe.
Survival of the safest.
What harm are mollusks at sunset,
dreams of Delphiniums or pots
of plants on the stairway?
Go wherever you like
this is the flower of your feeling, this earth---
this fringe of the leaf that keeps you alive
this curve of your eye on the arc of the horizon
that calls you to the pulse of your own heart
beating
a way to want to live a little longer.
Come out of the sea at last, and embrace
 the cold cruelty of this beautiful earth, blindingly awake
dreamless in a sharpened point of loveliness and fear,
only one life
and this exuberance of sweat and leaves drenched in colors and sorrows.
Heartbreak is the rounded shell of new lives coming forth.
This is the essential shape of all necessary shelter,
this round revolving place, earth, evolving
where my daughter’s determined and wild hair
reaches me back to days when chimps
chased ancestors up the squirrelly trees---
Lemurs at twilight were about to leap into language.
Language grows like Sequoia still where raven-speaks,
Scissor tails fly and the howler monkey’s dark green screams.
Why do you think baby chimps, fawns and baby squirrels
 are all so leaping crazy?
Evolution crawls with salamanders out of the forested
streams and Life like crystal
laughter is something that is smiling in silence
precious and pulsing with blood, pain and joy
and the difficult and musical earth turning a million years fast
With all our variety upon it, nurtured.
Yes, I say yes.

Oct. 07