Meiosis
soft bellies of infants come to mind
all unprotected flesh rounded to touch
smell of their fine hair like cilia prompts
uterine clench, staunch of breath obstinate
questionings of sense and outward things
a maker central centromere, an X that
forms as chromosomes double and
thicken: a mutagenic sea unseen nothing
can bring back the hour
with creative energy we look down from
high cliffs while shearing gusts
ripple a surface nosing the shore falling
back, fading to what floats beyond
the surf, birth is but a sleep and a forgetting
while ribonucleic acid makes its way
a clipper rolling with the swell, parting
double strands of whatever may
happen or come to being, to replicate
the moment, a linguistic intention
letters ACGT have no primal sympathy
no patience for endless imitation as if
their whole vocation were to repeat not
quite those things that had been said
before as this messenger along a frozen
sea of beauty in division, snips parent
from parent prepares for recombination
some fragment a hastening or quickening
from a dream of human life not yet precise
in the telling rigging chance poetics
as sailors might rounding Cape Horn lashed
to the mast unprotected flesh braced
for the moment somatic seas clash, stipple
of salt water splendor before nucleo-
tides swell and recede, attach disentangle
genetic ropes and leads, chromosomes
fading to fetal strands, curling invisible
for now intimations, tangles of heredity
[Lines in italics are samplings from William Wordsworth’s poem, “Ode: Intimations of Immortality.”]
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