The following three poems come from the sequence of fourteen sonnets called Time is how. It’s not so much a crown of sonnets — that old form where the last line of one poem becomes the first line of the next until you get back to the first line again. It’s more a tiara. Lines/phrases from the first sonnet become the titles of the following poems, and the final sonnet is made up of pieces from the first thirteen. It seemed to echo the way that DNA gets swapped around in the process of evolution. A tiara doesn’t get back to where it started, but its curve is linked all the way.

1. Time is how

Time is how one thing becomes another.

Fish evolves to take the form of seaweed

and hide in fronds of kelp. Feather

emerges from scale, begins to breed

the radiant array of plumages.

One cell that senses light grows into eye.

All the carefully elaborated lineages

by which bacterium becomes a fly.

Time, infinitely patient, joins

then separates. Enjambment, lines

that break apart. The fish is not a plant.

I am not bird, nor ever could be —

have not the power to recant

the million generations that encage me.

6. The million generations

Mitochondrion — minute time capsule,

tiny furnace for burning oxygen

slowly, molecule by molecule.

Remnant of that first bacterium

to crack this art of cracking energy

from elemental bonds. Now it has become

our captive, a coated organelle

tucked inside the busy confines of a cell.

This separate ring of DNA passed down

the generations, only through the female line.

Inheritance of hearth, carried

like a live coal in a box of moss-lined horn.

This bound circle we inherit

from our mothers — the ability to burn.

7. The radiant array of plumages

And who could believe such wonders emerge

out of eggshells. From hummingbird to ostrich —

that mammoth chicken, a fluffy juvenile

that just gets bigger, won’t grow up. In denial.

Golden pheasant, blonde crest pouffed back

and jacket glitzing like a Vegas lounge act.

Can-can curvaceous bottoms flocking

on flamingos. Juno’s peacocks cocking

stars on the marquee of their tails.

Fairy wren, blue pirouette. Nightingales,

brown flight wrapped around a throat.

And here by my window, the black-capped

chickadee wearing his tiny yarmulke. Magic

winter’s wisecrack, my branch-borne comic.

A couple of helpful notes to the poems:

Mitochondria are the small organelles inside each animal cell that use oxygen to provide energy. They have a separate ring of DNA from the genome in the cell’s nucleus, and “mitochondrial DNA” can be traced back through female ancestry.

“And who could believe such wonders emerge out of eggshells” comes from Book XV of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.