"The Enigma We Answer By Living."
If I can find it.
It's somewhere in these.
"Einstein didn't speak as a child waiting
till a sentence formed and emerged full-blown
from his head.
I do the thing, he later wrote, which nature drives me to do.
Does a fish know the water in which he swims?
This came up in conversation with a man
I met by chance, friend of a friend of a friend, who
passed through town carrying three specimen boxes of insects
he'd collected in the Grand Canyon--
one for mosquitoes, one for honeybees,
one for butterflies and skippers.
Each lined up in row, pinned and labeled,
tiny morphologic differences revealing how
adaptation happened over time.
The deeper down he hiked, the older the rock and the younger
the strategy for living in that place.
And in my dining room, the universe
found its way into this man bent on cataloging each innovation.
Though he knows it will all disappear-- the labels,
the skippers, the canyon.
We agreed then, the, old friends and the new,
that it's wrong to think people are
a thing apart from the whole.
As if we'd sprung from an idea out in space, rather
than emerging from the sequenced larval mess of creation that
binds us with the others, all playing
the endgame of a beautiful planet that's made
us want to name each thing and try
to tell its story against the vanishing."