Cultured

You’re not surprised to learn
That a single protein
For a potassium

Ion channel can change
A rattlesnake’s slither
To a rattling motion

Or its ability to rattle
To a slow slithering.
You’re not surprised, given

You’ve lived your beastly life
With glass-boned skeleton
Thanks to one amino

Acid switch transforming
A collagen protein.
You imagine yourself

As rattler in a lab,
Unable to threaten,
Whole body convulsing

With a rattling shiver
Every time you attempt
To slither in your cage,

Cage being the only
Environment in which
You’d continue to live.

On the Late Occasion

There’s a trifling way in which
All poems are occasional.
Reading through a motley stack

On a sunny afternoon
In a liminal season,
New and old from old and young,

Some straining against syntax
To make a mother tongue feel
Entangled as translation,

Some literal translations,
Some that read like transcriptions
Of kitchen conversations,

The triggering occasions
Of each one begin to jump
Out of the lines and choices,

The poems that start from a word,
A face, a scene, a private
Love or grief or resentment,

A desire to do something
To this damned language, a wish
To bind an old wound, a rage

At a recent news event.
What would it even look like,
A poem on no occasion?

Eclipse

We’re extremely numerous
And superbly camouflaged.
Your shadows are homes to us.

We split when you step on us.
Most of you host one of us,
Aligned opposite the light.

No, we’re not innocuous.
Yes, we are your parasites,
But we’ve been coevolving

With you so long the balance
Is judicious, a burden
Necessary to your life,

You’ve come to think. You’ll never
Catch us by watching yourself,
Examining your shadow.

We’re sure to hug the outline
Of any shade you give us.
You’re our permanent eclipse.

If you hope to catch a glimpse,
Find a crowded, sunlit spot
With no other light but sun,

Not too close to twilight, but
Well on either side of noon.
Watch the ground where people walk.

Relax. Don’t hyperfocus.
See how all the shadows point
Along the same alignment?

When someone steps directly
Across another’s shadow,
Watch for a faint reversal,

A shadow that seems to jump
The wrong way in the brief crush.
We just made another us.

Planetary Activity

What has Earth done? Nothing much
So far. So far it’s pretty
Well contained. Maybe its moon

Is slightly ruffled, maybe
It’s tickled its neighbor, Mars,
Winged tiny bits of itself

Around the other planets.
Otherwise, it’s been peaceful,
So far, minding its business

For the most part. What it’s made,
It’s kept close to the surface
A good few billion orbits.

Maybe keep an eye on it.
It tends to experiment.

Future Permanent Tense

Motion in the direction
Of whatever you’re watching
Makes the myth of the future,

The myth there is a future,
Woven out of past events
In which something you could see

Allowed you to get to it,
A metaphor, a fable,
Of something was and wasn’t

Yet, the future permanent.
Of course, if you spotted it,
It had already happened,

No matter how much more past
You created on your way
To that past where you’d reached it.