There’s Always Some New Way to Eat

However many deaths each day, however
Much suffering they will produce, a planet

Dying this world isn’t. Mathematicians
Work in teams like barn raisings to code lemmas

Into proof assistants. Urban cockatoos
In Australia learn to pry open dumpsters

By watching how other cockatoos do it.
Meanwhile, any teaspoon of undisturbed soil

Can easily contain more bacteria,
Fungi, and so forth than there are cockatoos

Or even humans on the face of the Earth,
Never mind countable mathematicians.

There’s probably a fly in your room right now.
Earth is writhing with lives adapting to live

With other lives’ adaptations to living.
It’s a mess. It’s only pretty if you like

Life and living. Don’t stare too hard at dying.
Life seems to have been the way life’s always been,

Back to when white cockatoos evolved in trees,
Back to when there were no mathematicians,

Back to when microbial mats carpeted
Seas lacking vertebrates or vascular plants.

It goes on like a mother of anything,
Working out the kinks in local chemistry.

You’ll figure it out well enough to go on
Yourselves a while, or not, whether you like it,

Whatever you can learn to gobble from it,
Or are what ends up in your dumpsters, pried out

By whatever cornucopia divers
Life’s open-ended systems invent to sift

Fresh parades of thermodynamic cascades.
Leviathan’s jaws love their flames, teeth, and meat.