Thursday, June 2, 2016

/...a role to play/ (Poem by Clara B. Jones)

/...a role to play/

I watched you sitting on the terrace of that shop on Broadway, not the street in Manhattan, but your Broadway in the mountains, not so crowded or loud as New York where one block is a mile away from any starting point.

Robust quadrueds rose in the Triassic, wide radiations writing “The Age of Mammals” across terrestrial landscapes, one dominant type destined to invade each niche.

Physics is the mother of mechanics, not beauty, atoms—not as atoms might be but what they have become in form and function accompanying Darwin from sea to island and back to water, reentering the bottleneck of chance and survival, selection not intentional but lost nonetheless by inferior types unable to survive another day without the intervention of gods, not mythic gods but humans with guilty impulses reclaiming and restoring zootics, some common like aging faces, some menacingly exotic, ecosystem engineers found in key positions as muscle articulates with bone, a leg superior to a finger, though both have a role to play.

It would be useless to wallow in sentiment over the monkey's wounds or over his fear of my tranquilizer gun pointed at his furry thigh.


The physicist weighs Mass and Velocity—Force unmatched though correlated as species coexisting may become competitors again if predators vanish.

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