Afterglow

The world excluding
Its human beings
May or may not be,

By human standards,
Reasonable, but
Those aren’t firm standards.

How reasonable
Is it to expect
The nonhuman world

To conduct itself
With human morals
And omens in mind?

And yet people do,
Watching the evening,
Yes another one,

It’s hard not to bless
The world for being
Unreasonable.

All Doctors

The yogurt tastes good to you.
Dr. Williams has been dead
Since just after you were born.

Now you are old. The yogurt
Tastes good to you. Your stomach
Carved to bits by doctors hurts.

You give yourself to the spoon,
To this moment that tastes good
Before your stomach hurts more.

Your doctors don’t know Williams
Existed, much less wrote poems
About, for instance, an old

Woman solaced by ripe plums
Eaten from a paper bag.

Sturgeons and Gar

Go to show that you don’t
Always need to adapt.

Extinction won’t always
Erase those slow to change.

Being a gar has worked
Well enough for so long,

Genomes that haven’t budged
In ninety million years

Or more produce more fish
Just like the gar before.

A sturgeon doesn’t just look
Antediluvian.

A sturgeon surviving
Now could have survived then.

The rest of life changes
Much faster as a rule,

But what has worked for gar
Forever works for gar.

Remember that next time
You’re trying to adapt.

The Secretion of Value

A few centuries more than four thousand
Years ago, the palatial Minoans
In the eastern Mediterranean

Had figured out how to get trace amounts
Of colorfast purple dye from the glands
Of sea snails. Rarity, difficulty,

Hierarchy, and beauty spell luxury.
Purple became a symbol of power.
Several centuries later, Phoenicians

Around Tyre had cornered the dye market,
Boiling up and drying dye-murex snails,
One per drop of purple or azure stain.

A few more centuries, three thousand years
Ago, give or take, Israelites seized
One dye factory, built a wall around it,

Decorated their temple with the dyes,
And filled Holy Writ with mentions of it.
Assyrians overran everything

And Babylonians overran them,
And so forth and so on. Millenniums
Of purple ruled by sumptuary laws,

As the massive snail middens grew.
Just archaeology and history now,
And puzzled children reading the Bible

Now and then in American churches
Bemused by the holiness of purple,
Which is fun but just another color.

Keep Moving

Like migrants using skulls to step
Cautiously across a stream, words

And phrases, symbols and ideas,
Ford treacherous generations

Of unstable, floating humans
To keep moving through the landscape

Of the years. Where are they going?
Past which border will they be safe?

Many words have been traveling
Since before thoughts could be captured

In stone or ink, and still aren’t safe.
There’s no sign of haven for signs.