Field Tech to a Naked Mole Rat
In this maze of rooms
a maze of tubes crisscrosses
the table in front of me.
I watch you scurry
through plexiglass and PVC,
your peached skin
creased and crinkled,
eyes nearly useless in the light.
It is late
and I am alone except
for you and your colony.
I take off my white coat,
lay my head on my arms.
Like you, I do not enjoy the lab.
Like you, I miss the xeric grasslands
of Ethiopia, green turned gold
in the wavering heat.
But it is late
and I should be thinking
of bigger things. You
hurry through connecting tubes
with room enough to turn around
and look at me. Nearly hairless,
your folds of skin vulnerable
in the light, your splayed hands
repulse me. You turn back, searching.
What are you looking for?
A way out, perhaps?
Or a way deeper in?
Oh fragile, hideous thing.
Is it too late
to ask you questions?
Cancer took my mother
before we could extract
your secrets, her face wrinkling
with premature age, hands
withered and rugose.
But still I keep looking, isolating
hearts and brains, slivers
of tissue sliced, pressed
between glass slides,
keeping you with me,
your wrinkled skin
so easy to cut
and pull back. Examine
me. Feel my hand
as I move you from one cage
to another. Our thin skin
feels the same.
But it is too late
for you. You will never again
see your homeland and I will lose you
in the sea of specimens
that lay open
on the table beneath my scalpel.
The Night Before the Summer Solstice
Outside mother’s house,
the live oak—older
and more grounded. The night
in its summer cloak, shrugged
half-off, so much light here
at the edge of the city. In my hand
an ammonite, spiraled shell
of some ancient organism
who never knew
its name.
I thumb the ridged surface,
the dark cavities of its body.
Language fails
at its own task.
I cannot comprehend
extinction, this entire species gone
so many millions of years,
cannot comprehend
the beauty of its emptiness.
*
A baby born, named Grace, given words. She reaches
out to touch her mother, to feel the warmth
of the body that housed her, but the atoms will not allow it.
Even as they appear to touch, they remain separate.
That is how language works.
*
From the current list of Crayola crayons:
eggplant,
manatee,
cornflower,
plum,
wisteria,
fern,
canary,
mahogany,
peach,
gold—all names
for real things, things we can touch
or not touch.
*
At four, I ruined
mother’s fossil collection.
Colored in the grooves
of the ammonites—indigo, forest green,
bittersweet. My human mark
on this artifact of life—
but isn’t that always what we do?
*
We know in our bones we cannot trust names.
We know in our bones words are not enough.
*
Forgiveness,
my mother understands. This fossil an apology
though not required.
She forgave me decades ago
when my trespass was new.
I cannot forgive myself,
my back against the oak,
but somehow oak feels
broken, half-thought,
not thing-in-and-of-itself.
To touch its bark, to really know
its surface,
for this I would give much.
Words, half-thoughts—broken
meanings straining
over the void, separation
of the thing and its name.
The night a spiral, a catacomb
of ancient stars spinning
arcs through sky. Even
as I look, they could be dead,
burnt out millions of years ago. This too,
I cannot comprehend,
but see the shadows of their light
and think them real.
*
We have no language—no syntax and no lexicon
*
Night shifts and mother wakes,
comes outside, places her hand
against my back.
I gift her the ammonite and sob, wordless
at the dawn, at her forgiveness,
at the unspeakable immensity
of the world I cannot touch
which cannot touch me.
