My old friend Price Strobridge
might begin like this:
If the observable universe
Is 13 billion years old,
and I am 65,
then I have been around
433 whatever comes after a billionth
of the time the universe
has been around.
As far as the universe is concerned,
I’m not even born yet.
If the observable universe
is 278 million light years around,
and if nobody anywhere knows much of anything
about the unobservable universe,
which is most of the universe,
and I stand 5 foot 8
and a half –
I won’t bother to figure that percentage,
how big I am.
Go ask some amoeba
to explain the infield fly rule.
You wouldn’t shame a poor amoeba
like that, would you?
And yet we little human rudiments argue ceaselessly
over gods and their purposes and rankings.
And yet we kill and kill
in the names of abstractions no one comprehends.
I can’t comprehend the infield fly rule,
let alone how anything much
around me or even within me works,
never mind the nature or the will of God,
if that’s who made all this trouble and miracle.
Not quite in time for this year’s Christmas,
in the Chester Zoo in Chester, England,
Flora the komodo dragon
indulged in parthenogenesis.
Calling all amoeba:
should we declare a second Christmas holiday?
The amoebas won’t say. It’s too much for them,
a virgin birth,
brought about by the model for Godzilla.
But what astonishes me
most dependably
is the ever-expanding magnitude of my ignorance.
In the face of the galaxies and clusters and quasars,
in the faceless face of the amoeba –
What’s a virgin birth or two?
You could spend an excellent lifetime
watching how cats live in their muscles,
or the complete, unaffected strut
of a crow, or the ever-changing changelessness
of one stretch of one river.
You’ll never get it all,
but you’ll get enough to pass on some
to your fellow travelers,
your fellow snowflakes,
your fellow sparks from the campfire.
