Evolution
You are talking on the phone,
about your day or job, living
what you've grown to count on
like morning, the way you suppose
your voice will emerge, when suddenly
you announce something unexpected,
utter a word or hear the wrong response
cross the wire and flush your ear with pain,
and when you hang up the phone
even the street looks strange, shabbier
than you remembered
and the houses contain a world formed
while your back was turned, while you
were looking elsewhere.
Maybe you want someone you didn't know
you wanted. Maybe you are moving house.
Maybe this sourness and spastic stomach
are what the first amphibian tasted
the day its gills sprouted into lungs,
and unaccountably tired of swimming
or out of curiosity, it threw itself
onto a nearby, craggy shore
and when it opened up its mouth in surprise
at the rough dark earth beneath its breast
and the sudden stillness, it was already too late
to slide back into the primordial soup,
it was breathing. How different
the sun must have felt
from that position, bearing down,
relentless, altering the texture
of that first amphibian's brown
slimy skin. And lying there, with its stomach
in an uproar, maybe its water life, the grappling
after bottom dwellers, the endless
snuffling among cracked shells
and other detritus, all that swimming
and diving, began to seem like
just one of many possibilities
or even a kind of drowning.
Human Nature
When someone presses his mouth to mine, I don't hesitate,
I open my lips. But doesn't this willingness
to give myself over look as much like sacrifice
as anything, and only Jesus,
with his heart the size of God's fist, could manage that
and not be plagued. I might ask
those summering geese, white
to the very tips of their feathers, who rise up
and don't care about pleasure they give – that's not a gift
but their nature, like Nietzsche's birds of prey
who love lambs with their appetites. What if my nature
is to love indiscriminately and with reckless
prodigal haste? What if wired into me, part of the helical
strands of code that made my hair brown and my elbows
bony, is the kiss? When the wheels of their migratory clocks
shift gears, the geese will deafen the air but I'll remain
without instinct or sense, burying my face
in a stranger's neck, as if the sole condition
for my love is that it be accepted and I crave
the jangled heart beating itself
into a frenzy and something tangible
to focus on: the insistent tongue, the hard as nails teeth
which lie just beyond the lips and are as white
as the geese and almost as startling.
The hardest task is to endure. Think of Peter:
when the cock crowed and Jesus looked at him with compassion
and no reproach, he ran. But what I need
is a story that springs from a purely human nature
and teaches good and suitable devotion.
For what myth can explain the blind earnestness
with which I hold out my best part to a lover whose gaze
is turned inward, whose feathers are damp
and already shifting beneath my hand.
