How Healing Crawls

Epithelial liquid crystals,
Symmetrical at two different scales,
If modeled as fluid dynamics,

Could predict how wounds heal as skin crawls.
Detailed symmetries of skin cell sheets
In degrees of crystalline order

Refract light differently depending
On their orientation, magic
Of modern liquid crystal displays.

Nematic and hexatic exist
Simultaneously, nematic
At one scale, hexatic scales smaller.

In cells, then, as in liquid crystals,
And as in poetry, form forces
Function, easing any prediction,

But once you run the simulation
And know exactly what forces next,
Can you dream what those predictions mean?

Getting Eaten by a Tiger’s Skeleton

People fear the lively dead,
Their own and the world’s remains,
From skulls and ghouls to vaccines.

We’re past the Day of the Dead,
And we’re past All Hallow’s Eve,
But we’re never past ambush

From what we choose to believe,
Probably since we don’t choose,
Really, do we? Students write

Essays on faith for college,
Students with faith in college
To improve their salaries

Over the long haul of life.
No one in class mentions faith
In ambush by revenants,

The one faith all seem to have.
Some of their lives will not have
Long hauls, thinks the professor,

Remembering a student
Who died just after writing
This same assignment on faith,

Memory like a tiger’s
Skeleton in the forest,
Stalking the surviving past.

If We Don’t Navigate This as a World

Said Larry Fink of BlackRock

About the outbreak of war—

Then everything could contract,

A warning to billionaires—

But what’s really interesting

Is that phrasing, as a world.

What did you say? Come again?

Antiglobalists might shriek,

But there’s a necessity

And a higher register

Of arrogance in the phrase.

As if people were the world,

As if humans are a world,

A single organism,

Capable to pull itself

Together, a singular

World, a whole world, this whole world.

Earth would laugh, if a world could.

Note

Sometimes you get bad hiccups.
Hello? Are you reading this?
You’re not immune to hiccups

Or the occasional glitch.
Not so poetic is it,
When all the machinery,

The lives that build and sustain
Your bits of introspection,
All the inaccessible

Functions underlying thought
Intrude on your vast musings.
Wait, you say, they’ll go away.

Oh, they will, and so won’t you,
But they won’t have noticed you.