Cambrian Two

In evolutionary terms,
It can’t be such a promising
Pattern—a genus rapidly
Pruned of its few species.

But that’s the story of bipeds
For the past million years or so,
Dwindling from a modest handful
Of species to one example,

Which, hilariously, has both
Found out about its lost cousins
And exploded around the world
In monophyletic triumph.

Can numbers prevent extinction?
Ask the passenger pigeon, or,
Better yet, ask a trilobite.
Still, those are faint comparisons.

How about mitochondria?
The secret of their long success
Was becoming permanently
Enmeshed in nucleated cells.

Those cells diversified wildly,
And multicellularity
Transformed the possibilities
For what lives could be lived on Earth.

The mitochondria followed
Their lineages, numerose
In each individual cell
But whittled down, simplified, spare,

Much the same mitochondria
In any species, anywhere—
There’s one option not extinction.
Maybe people will continue

Not as a free-living species
But enablers for evolving
Cultures of massive artifice
To blossom, small prerequisites.

Other Magical Beliefs

Supernatural, paranormal,
Scriptural—when you observe your world
Do you sense some unseen agency?

Are all the patterns you see a scrim
For some theatrical puppetry?
Is any other species maddened

By its awareness that its senses
Are necessarily limited?
The madness is imagination

Is limited, too, by memory,
And memory by experience
And its unstable storage systems.

So, you’re sure that something must be there,
But what is that something? An agent,
Agents, some sort of social beings

With intentions (you have intentions)
And rich communication systems
(You have communication systems),

But invisible, behind the scenes,
Mysterious, given many things
Are mysterious—thus the agents

Behind them must be mysterious.
The mysterious part is the key.
Supernatural explanations

Are rarely posited in cases
Of the banal and most obvious,
Such as that your cup of coffee cooled

After you left it on the counter.
Maybe God invented entropy,
Maybe there are spirits of cooling.

The possibilities for other
Magical beliefs are limitless
In number, if not diversity.