"In the old paintings of the Italian Renaissance
they made of the human capacity for limits
an allegory and a dance.
It was the story of Three Graces, appetite for life
meets chaste restraint, and the result is beauty.
The dance resembles wheeling constellations.
One would like to think that beauty
moves the IMF and the World Bank,
that the black and white flash of a flock of buntings
in October wind headed south toward winter habitat
would find that the December fields their kind has
known and mated in for 30 centuries or more
were still intact.
That they will not go the way of the long billed Arctic curlews
who flew from Newfoundland to Patagonia in every weather,
and are gone now from the tides on Earth, the last of them
seen by any human alit in a Texas marsh in 1964.
It will tell her that the gleaming appliance
that kept her milk cold in the night
was made with chlorofluorocarbons.
Lucretius, your master Epictetus was
right in a general way about atoms.
It turns out they are electricity
having sex in an infinite variety of permutations.
Plato's yearning has a separate being
multiplied in all the ways that all the shapes on Earth
are multiple.
Complex.
The philosopher who said, the world was made of fire
was also right.
These chlorofluorocarbons react with ozone.
They've eaten the hole above the tropopause
where oxygen breeds ozone out of ultraviolet light.
The book will tell her that.
It won't tell her that whenever there's
a flash flood in Washington, DC, which is usually in spring,
storm drains disgorge the excrements of Senators
into the slow river which flows past housing
projects, underfunded schools, where
the young pledge allegiance and are taught to read, when they
are taught to read, a book with the title like Getting
to Know Your Planet.
There may be photographs of pools of oil.
The mud of the rainbow boa curled
at the center of the Earth, according to the old Quechuan
stories of La Selva, where the great trees house the 10,000
kinds of beetle, reptiles no eye has ever seen changing color
in the hot, green, unchanging leaves whenever
the faint breeze stirs them above an understory
of bromiliads and orchids whose womb or mouth
like flowers are the shapes of desire in human dreams.
And butterflies, larger than her palms held up to catch a ball
or ward off fear.
Along the river, wide leaved banyans
where flocks of noisy parrots, fruit eaters and nut eaters,
rise in successive flares of blue and yellow.
It will seem like poetry forgetting
its promise of sobriety, to say that the rosy shinings
in the thick brown current are dolphins rising to the surface
where gouts of the oil that burns in the engine of the car
I'm driving oozes from the banks.
The book will try to tell her what life is,
give her the amazement of it, flung off from the sun.
A molten core still pouring rivers
of black basalt across the Earth sometimes
from the old fountains of its origin.
Then the long cooling, the unexpected essentially
miraculous bacteria that grew green pigment,
broke down carbon dioxide gases, took in the carbon,
turned it into sugar, gave off molecules of oxygen
the child on her way to school is breathing, and so bred life.
Something about DNA.
The curled, musical ladder of sugars.
Something about consciousness, how it came to be,
and how it wrote the book she's reading.
How some almost biped mammal stopped in some task
and gazed at stars so bright they seem to creak,
and uttered a wondering, guttural Gah, or Earth, to say,
where am I?
I am here.
Or probably, in glittering dark, I am here.
Where am I?"