Time is how
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.