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"Evolution"
I had written three pages
on how insects are such good chemists, citing
the silkworm sex attractant,
and the bombardier beetle,
spraying out hot hydrogen peroxide when threatened.
And I was in the middle
of telling the story of the western pine beetle,
which has an aggregation pheromone
calling all comers (of that species).
The pheromone has three components:
one from the male, frontalin,
exo-brevicomin wafted by the female
and (ingenious)
abundant, pitch-smelling myrcene
from the host pine.
I had written this the night before,
broken it down into short lines.
When I woke up Sunday and sat down to work,
quietly, with a second cup of coffee,
the sun was on my desk.
I had some flowers I had picked on the hill
in a vase: bush lupine, California poppies,
and some of the grass that grows here.
On the grass stalks the bracts were a few centimeters apart.
They were beige, finely lined husks,
their line set by a dark spikelet,
more like a stiffened flagellum than a thorn.
A hint of something feathered inside.
The sun's warmth had burst some of the pods,
which had fallen on the draft
(the words were lost in the sun), fallen
by chance next to the shadows of seed still hanging, and
the grass seed,
like dormant grasshoppers,
legs of now bent spikelets
cast second, finer shadows.
Then I saw you walking on the hill.
-- Roald Hoffman
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"265"
I don't know one damned butterfly from another
my ignorance of the stars is formidable,
also of dogs & ferns
except that around my house one destroys the other
When I reckon up my real ignorance, pal,
I mumble 'many returns' --
next time it will be nature & Thoreau
this time is Baudelaire if one had the skill
and even those problems O
At the mysterious urging of the body or Poe
reeled I with chance, insubordinate & a killer
O formal & elaborate I choose you
but I love too the spare, the hit-or-miss,
the mad, I sometimes can't always tell them apart
As we fall apart, will you let me hear?
That would be good, that would be halfway to bliss
You said will you answer back? I cross my heart
& hope to die but not this year.
-- John Berryman
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