Spooky Polypi at a Distance

Aside from malacologists

And logomaniacs, few folks

Know what malacologists know.

Oddly, given that hard k sound,

Malakos signified tender,

Soft, and gentle in Ancient Greek,

Rare exception, apparently,

To the bouba/kiki effect.

Anyway, squishy fish studies,

These days somewhat popularized

By lore of smart cephalopods.

The study of anything’s cool

If the subject borders magic—

Wormholes, entangled quantum states,

AI, octopus wizardry.

It’s not that people want to know

More intimately what’s under

Scrutiny so much as the thrill

Of any hints there are other

Timelines, other-minded agents,

Entwined weirdness in the framework

Of a householder’s universe.

It tends to end in puzzlement.

Which parts held that hint of magic—

The monstrous tentacles, the eyes

Of the near-alien agent,

Its behaviors, its spiral whorls?

People always seem to end up

Clutching emptied material.

At the Malacological

Museum, in the Makarska

Franciscan monastery’s shell,

The whole collection is just shells.

Grounds for Leaving

The tendency is to live
Or to think about living

As if what you have, what’s been
Allotted, what you have left,

Are the days in front of you,
Which you use up, which you lose,

And you don’t have that many.
Oops, you burned another day,

You wasted another day,
Time you won’t get back again.

But none of those days exist,
And what’s null is never fixed.

Maybe consider instead
The entirely plausible

Scenario that your days
Are the ones you’ve lived, the ones

You can remember. Those days,
Like the body, do decay,

But only as they pile up.
The past isn’t what you can’t

Have back. Days you had, you have.
Live more, before you forget.

Let them fall like crowns of leaves.
You’re the ground. You’re not the trees.

The Type Specimen

The young Percy Grainger, looking

Like Vladimir Putin bewigged,

Was up to all sorts of odd things,

From fresh folk-music arrangements

To avant-garde experiments

With beatless aleatorics,

From sexual flagellation

In keen sadomasochism

To loud pro-Nordic racism,

And that hardly touches his range.

He would build his own museum,

Rate himself ninth-greatest all time

Of the classical composers

And declare himself a failure.

He left Australia to claim it

As a lifelong expatriate

Patriot, wrote for marching bands

Earnestly as for symphonies

And built elaborate machines

To auto-generate music,

Proclaiming them the true future

Of composition, not humans,

While to this day he is best known

To those aficionados

Of soothing, nostalgic pieces

Who still are fond of his setting

Of the folk dance, Country Gardens.

Now, for your homework this evening,

Articulate human nature

From holotype Percy Grainger.

Infinite Loops of Mutual Obligations Tether Together

Interchain hydrogen bonds
Gain strength and stability
From numbering in millions,

Although individual
Hydrogen bonds are quite weak.
Hence the deep double nature

Of DNA, both stable
And separable, subject
To copying and decay.

Humanity might not be
A superorganism
So much as a latter-day

Echoing of DNA
With gift-giving exchanges
And favors taking the place

Of hydrogen bonds in chains.
Cohesion builds from exchange,
Giving and accepting

Gifts plus time. Kindness to one
Is honored by acceptance
Of the gift and then later

Kindness in return. Again.
And again. The difference
With human bonds, however,

Is that their strength is greatest
When at their most intimate,
Their longest chains the weakest.

Language has tools to change this,
Has metaphors of kinship
Suggesting intimacy

And pairwise relationships
Between individuals
And strangers, armies, the state.

But language isn’t potlatch
Yet, and metaphors aren’t yet
Gifts themselves. Still, time may tell.

Averted

There may be a universe
Somewhere where God is so good,
God’s like a catastrophe

Avoided successfully—
Nothing bad having happened,
God must have not been a threat.

No one needs theodicy,
Since there’s no harm to explain,
And God, having done no harm,

Isn’t perceived to exist,
To have ever existed,
Nor need to exist. Poor God

Of that good universe, left
Forever uninvented.