Which Isn’t a Poem

Every component of the organism

Is as much an organism as every

Other part, Scharf quotes McClintock as claiming,

Which has a fine, wheels-within-wheels ring to it,

Echoing the Mandelbrot set echoing,

In its own way, Jonathan Swift and his fleas

Of infinite regress. Look out at the stars,

At the Milky Way, the Magellanic Clouds,

The Hubble Telescope’s Deep Field, and so forth.

In the single-star test image of the Webb

Telescope in infrared, already whorls

Of swarming, vastly distant galaxies lurk,

Recognizable thanks to galaxies known.

There’s no doubt a habit of repetition

Organizes the forms of the universe.

It’s not kept to life on Earth in that respect.

It’s a modular and composite cosmos,

From its quarks to its Great Wall of galaxies,

And you, organisms of organisms,

Hosting parasites most hosting parasites,

Fit the bill, which is why organism works

As a name, although Scharf puzzles over it.

But there’s this other thing the universe does

In its scalable, mirroring echoings—

At odd junctures, here and there, a pattern throws

Skeins unfurling some new kind of patterning,

Continuous with it, qualitatively

Different, as organic chemistry is

Continuous but life qualitatively

Different, or as languages are from life.