Wonder Is of Unknown Origin

How anything lives at all,
Anywhere at all, any
Life at all, is only more

Mystery now than ever,
Now you know the chemistry
Lacks any élan vital.

All the physics is the same.
It’s simply combination,
But why these combinations?

It’s as if the universe,
Hell-bent on exhaustively
Sifting through what’s possible,

Reached life like a code-breaker
Using brute-force computing,
And here we are. This is it,

Maybe all the it there is.
Maybe it took a cosmos
Of misses to get one hit,

And here it is, this planet.
Stubborn, though, now that it’s here,
Now tumblers stumbled open.

It gets set back and set back.
It eats all its selves alive.
All that lives gnaws on what lives,

Out to the outer edges
Where it reaches light and heat
Transformed by hydrocarbons

Somehow, for no known reason
And many invented ones,
Invented by you, living

Your own lives, inventing us,
Your notions, names, and reasons,
Your guess-whys while it just goes.

Make the planet a snowball.
Slow its spin. Leach oxygen.
Smack it with asteroid strikes.

Zombie life falls back, and then
Marches on. The Great Dying
Itself only winded it.

From each extinction, the next
Radiation. Don’t you hope
That, however your end comes,

Even if not, as you think,
At your own arrogant hands,
What comes next has no wonder?