For example I go back to the twenty-five caged fish
dropped into Snow Creek to assess the toxicity
of the waters that the infamous chemical company
released its wastes into over decades and how
all of them, all twenty-five, lost their equilibrium
more or less immediately, how three minutes later
blood billowed from their gills like wild fuchsia
loosened from a hedgerow four thousand miles away
and how, shortly after that, all of them had finished
early with this life, as did the people of Alabama
who fished and swam and drank from the great
Choccolocco Creek which the smaller Snow Creek fed
its bad chemistry into, on and on without advisory
from the many who knew, the long processions
shuddering in time from church to gravesite quietly
as cellophane across the lethal waters. So much life
destroyed by the elements thought to have given
rise to it to start with as the energy and phosphorus
sent to earth by meteorites landing in hot pools
of acids frothing up around the bases of volcanoes
made available the enzymes needed for what science
now calls chemical life, meaning the intermediary
step between inorganic rock and the earth’s first-ever
spontaneously formed and truly living cell, which I
liken to a wide, voracious, and unblinking eyeball.
First living cell, what do you have to say for yourself
now? I see the dumbstruck circle of you spinning
late at night tonight on my monitor billions of years
before language and I head down to the nearby bodega
for a sports drink when I’m practically plowed over
by an endless garbage truck, one in whose packed bin
your double might be brewing even as it narrowly
whizzes me by—another take on life, this time hewn
from the drizzles and perfumes of an unstoppable
crapulence. For in such days it had been customary
following exertion, whether heavy, half-assed, or fake
critical thought through commercials, to give back
to oneself by way of mass-market beverages, the body
insensitive to the specifics of its losses, wanting only
to be replenished. But here’s the thing. There was just
one chance for life to start on earth and after that any
spontaneously formed organism novel to the planet
would fall prey to all the ardent preexisting organisms
the instant it came into being. So you’re pretty much
a celebrity, first living cell. And yet my heart is heavy.
Don’t look at me, I can feel you say, it isn’t mere life
that’s the problem so much as something neither
I nor my offspring ever predicted. We had big plans
for shit on this planet till some random event sent it in
a direction we never wanted and still can’t fathom.
We’re into birdsong as much as anyone, not so much
all this willful endangerment. And look at you there,
up all night and sweating. Wade into the world a little
less deeply. Lie down in the shallows and let it stick
its infinite leech mouths to whatever ails you, because
much as you want to fix what is, what is wants to fix
you more. Unload on it your carbon, your phosphorus.
Your bones’ calcium will be good for plant life, ditto
your potassium. Not to mention your hydrogen, when it
escapes our atmosphere, might one day power a star.