The Grandsire Bells (audio only)
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Evolution
How, Alan Turing thought, does the soft-walled,
jellied, symmetrical cell
become the asymmetrical horse? It was just before dusk,
the sun’s last shafts doubling the fence posts,
all the dark mares on their dark shadows. It was just
after Schrodinger’s What is Life,
not long before Watson, Franklin, Crick, not long before
supper. How does a chemical soup,
he asked, give rise to a biological pattern? And how
does a pattern shift, an outer ear
gradually slough its fur, or a shorebird’s stubby beak
sharpen toward the trout?
2016
Windows
When the cow died by the green sapling, her limp udder splayed on the grass like something from the sea, we offered our words in their low calibrations— which was our fashion—then severed her horns with a pug-toothed blade and pounded them out to an amber transparency, two sheets that became, in their moth-wing haze, our parlor windows. They softened our guests with the gauze-light of the Scriptures, and rendered to us, on our merriest days, the sensation of gazing through the feet of a gander. In time we moved up to the status of glass—one pane, then two—each cupping in proof of its pu
1994
Metamorphosis: 1680
I paint flowers decorated with caterpillars.
I want to inquire into everything that exists and find
out how it began.
out how it began.
—Maria Sibylla Merian
2017