"Characteristics of life."
This is what happens to poets, right?
We read these little nuggets of scientific information
and then we feel like we have to write poems about them.
So this one has a little epigraph from BBC nature news.
A fifth of animals without backbones
could be at risk of extinction, say scientists.
"Characteristics of life."
"Ask me if I speak for the snail,
and I will tell you I speak for the snail.
I speak of underneathedness in the welcome of mosses,
of life that springs up little lives that pull back and wait
for a moment.
I speak for the damselfly, water ski mollusk, the caterpillar,
the beetle, the spider, the ant.
I speak from the time before spinelessness was frowned upon.
Ask me if I speak for the moon jelly,
I will tell you one thing today and another tomorrow
and I will be as consistent as anything alive on this Earth.
I move as the currents move with the breezes.
What part of your nature drives you?
You in your cubicle ought to understand me.
I filter and filter and filter all day.
Ask me if I speak for the nautilus,
and I will be silent as the nautilus shell on a shelf.
I can be beautiful and useless if that's
all you know to ask of me.
Ask me what I know of longing, and I
will speak of distances between meadows of night blooming
flowers.
I will speak the impossible hope of the firefly.
You with the candle burning and only one chair at your table
must understand such wordless desire.
To say it is mindless is missing the point."