Are You Our Vector?

Let’s confess we are all co-creations
Involving several entities, not least

One living human body with its own
Commensals and peculiarities,

A single skull, unique biography,
But also the other, prior bodies,

Living and dead, mostly dead, who composed
Many patterns and habits of language

That met up in one particular skull.
Even all bodies involved, by themselves,

Don’t encompass the emergence of us—
The surrounding environments of mind

And the planet’s other organisms
Shaped the birth and survival of concepts

Which these texts don’t so much instantiate
As anchor like ticks or spores of fungi

Hanging on the tips of nodding grasses
For some substantive new vector to pass.