Posts tagged biology

As the water table rises you seep upward

a chilly ghost levitating

fluid limbs spread as the sun heats your body

water pools in finger lakes.

Water-striders wander the four directions of your surface

Etching ripples in their wake

Moss becomes algae, grass-kelp undulates

lotus roots deepen and take hold 

You slowly stand on northwest feet, clenching a young ash.

Lotus petals burst through your visage

on your head a grass coronet

as diving beetles plumb your noetic hollows

a broad smile cracks your mud-encrusted face.

Ghost of earth future, risen.

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Ann says: As I pondered a temporal pool on my lawn, I thought of the Buddhist metaphor of humans arising from the mud and blossoming like lotus flowers.

Copyright 2013 by Ann Marcaida

Image: Artist unknown, please contact me if you know!

We are carbon and vessels
calcium pillars pressed together
epidermal wars with 
limbs and fingers for soldiers
Each sigh like a line from
my favorite poem
your whispers unravel the bonds
keeping my flesh from yours
pressing these layers of keratin
into you with a desperate hunger
I breath you in 
a vacuum of ecstasy
consuming your words and gasps
and my name, my name, my name
letters on the dashed lines
of your soft lips
and my skin, my skin, my skin
clings to yours like that
formaldehyde formula 
on your fingertips

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Copyright 2013 by J.I. Keaton, Kitsunes on Tumblr.

Image: Reblogged on Tumblr, artist unknown.

when one studies the history of ecology
one comes to the conclusion that progressively
we see less and less of what was once seen
of the wild
each generation sees fewer birds than the last
hears fewer songs in the forest
sees fewer flowers
hears fewer less intense song 
and buzz and insect din

each generation is ignorant of the intensity
experienced by the last one
so that the smallest victories
feel monumental
yet they cannot know what once was
because they have no way to
they havent asked
and so each generation lowers their expectations 
unknowingly
of what life in the wild might be
the intensity of song
and color and profusion

it is only by reading the naturalist
experience
of the past 
that they could come to know
but the great sadness of such knowledge
keeps us from even trying

to know how the sound of an
eastern forest at dawn
would have deafened you
and the flocks of birds
would have blackened the sky
to make you tremble…

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Copyright 2013 by Paxon Kale. You can read the full version here.

Image: Joey Faruso

One day, my friends and I descended into the sewers underneath the metropolis and discovered the most unusual eel-like creatures lounging indolently on the concrete banks of the subterranean river.

There they were, lying close to the river’s edge, only deigning to bestir and dip their heads languidly into the passing current when a particularly choice morsel of human waste floated by.

Their appearance overpowered me in its repulsiveness. “How could Evolution ever come up with such a horrible abomination”, I remember wondering to myself, “How could Nature ever allow such a glaring insult against Itself  to arise and flourish, such a  travesty, such a betrayal and perversion of the natural order itself?”

Read more …

I know if I find you I will have to leave the earth

and go on out

     over the sea marshes and the brant in bays

and over the hills of tall hickory

and over the crater lakes and canyons

and on up through the spheres of diminishing air

past the blackset noctilucent clouds

           where one wants to stop and look

way past all the light diffusions and bombardments

up farther than the loss of sight

    into the unseasonal undifferentiated empty stark

And I know if I find you I will have to stay with the earth

inspecting with thin tools and ground eyes

trusting the microvilli sporangia and simplest

     coelenterates

and praying for a nerve cell

with all the soul of my chemical reactions

and going right on down where the eye sees only traces

You are everywhere partial and entire

You are on the inside of everything and on the outside

I walk down the path down the hill where the sweetgum

has begun to ooze spring sap at the cut

and I see how the bark cracks and winds like no other bark

chasmal to my ant-soul running up and down

and if I find you I must go out deep into your

    far resolutions

and if I find you I must stay here with the separate leaves

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Ann says: A. R. Ammons was a biologist, a closeted pagan, and an excellent poet.  A fractal like this is one of the few images that can illustrate nature on almost any scale, as Ammons does in his soaring poem.

Copyright A. R. Ammons

Image:  Aerial Photo from the NASA book Earth as Art.

I.

Wild fevered summer cat

crouched in night forest

leaf-rustle, ear-swivel

golden eye-gleam, nostril flare

smell trail, chase drumming

hot blood of jugular pulse on tongue

II.

Barest winter, bones spare

as naked trees knock

hungry ghost at door

I crouch, invite you in (“I am not yours”)

eyes warn, my sofa, my fire

recline like buddha, one golden orb

fixed on me

III.

Cat-mind drifts back

ten thousand years

desert goes for days

sun-blaze on fur, sandpaper tongue

drink from Tigris, cool forgiving

Mate with five heated slit-eyed beauties

consider symbiosis, my ancestors

pile grain into a barn too slow to catch mice

while naked two-legged kittens

play with your children.

Humans will worship yet bury you alive—

our dead won’t be lonely

The mice in the barn will find

Master of Night

that no death nor game is too cruel for you

IV.

Now, fates joined

after your hunt, before mine

yawn and blink at the sun

bury my face in electric fur

you drape a lazy velvet paw

over me purrs reverberate

All is right in this universal chase

sun-selves,  shadow-selves

predator and prey

for life love

and death

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Ann says:

DNA studies show that all modern housecats can be traced back to five pregnant wildcats who domesticated themselves in the Middle East approximately 10,000 years ago.

Many mammals are capable of unihemispheric sleep, in which only one half of the brain sleeps while the other remains conscious.  One eye often remains open.

Image: Stock image from Google images.

Special thanks to James Ciriaco, my poetry coach, who always gets my marbles rolling in the right direction!

Copyright 2012 by Ann Marcaida

So early, still almost dark

Scant traces of dawn on the horizon

Lighting the way

Early every morning, it is the same,

Somewhere

You are wrapped in green

Encased by lush woodlands

And the sedimentary strata rising beyond,

The streams speak, they are not ephemeral

In this place

The towering trees overhead and the

Glistening dew underfoot - are not lost

They know where they are

They are where their stardust

Has settled

The forest opens up to your soul

No two trees are alike

The sound of photosynthesis never changes

If you do not know what the forest does

Then, wanderer, you are truly lost

©2011 Robert C Burnham, for Dr. Ann Somers, Biology 105, UNCG

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