Thirty-Two Hundred Mutations in Thirty-Five Hundred Weeks

You’re a mammal. You know the drill.

You burn through enough mutations,

The wall opens / and the blue night

Pours through. Dogs and mice are spendthrift,

Not so much giraffes and mole rats.

Humans are comparatively

Thrifty: about one mutation

Every week or so. Sixty-eight

Years or thereabouts of aging

And then, pretty soon, off you go.

Just think (and you do—your species

Has mused on immortality

Obsessively, since the moment

You first worked out the odds of death)

If you could convince all your cells

To save a little, just cut down

On the mutations, maybe half

A mutation a week, you’d be

In pretty good shape, give or take,

To somewhere around one-forty.

Of course, then it would be tragic

To die at a mere one hundred,

With a third of your life ahead,

And you’d work until one-thirty.

How much of this world could you take,

Exactly? More than you’re getting

Or likely to get, but how much

Before you’d die to pull up stakes?

Dogs and mice don’t seem too depressed,

Nor do parrots or tortoises

Seem all that blissfully happy.

Maybe. Hard to say, cross-species.

Meanwhile, another week goes by,

And your cells are still mutating.

It’s tough to know you could get less,

But at least you know your limits.