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Poetry

When Charles Darwin sat down, finally
to write his big book
he wondered, not
                               how it would end, but where
                               on the shelf
                                                   it would end up.
Lucky for him, over the eons
librarians
                evolved
to be among the swiftest of the species,
able to connect dots and make great
intuitive leaps
between those works of fact
                                               and other acts of imagination.
They’d know where his story slips in
best and fittest.

2.

A first-year college student raises the sash
of his second-floor rented room and creeps
like a cat onto the shingled roof
of the porch below,
                                  over which the orange moon
hangs, or is hung—
                                   over which, on the open page
of his modern art text, a moo cow, a newly married
kissing couple, and a tree
                                          jump, hang, or simply
drift. He is a bungalow boy, raised
on wide streets—and all the while
the world is multi-storied?
                                            His heart jumps. And what’s
this fragrance, carried wafting through the leaves,
from which island?

3.

             In great faith and firm conviction the world
behaves
              unfolding open wide and wider
a flower mouthing miracle of detail
that changes and remains the same
under the observing eye
                                        of Mr. Darwin
who plods through time and sentence
and chart and drawing, wondering
who or what the object is
                                           jumping
(at times) up and down at the dawn
of all things, in spiced delight,
excitement
                   over
the moon, the orange moon.

4.

The smartest move I ever made was to marry
a librarian. They have the best, most select
stories. A first-year college student approaches the desk
and asks for a book his professor has assigned:
Orange and Spices.
                                Someone, the librarian thinks,
has been drifting dreaming sights and smells
of equatorial seas, while seated in class.
She politely repeats, Orange and Spices—
which class is that? Biology, the student replies.
And in the pause between one heart beat and the next
the librarian leaps
from the jungle where all is one
                                                     mass of leaf
and retrieves, selecting from the shelf,
you mean, she asks, The Origin of Species?

5.

On the sixth day, Sir Charles Darwin
                                                              closes the book
on everything he saw and experienced
when he was so very young, all those years ago,
the boat, the islands. So serendipitous,
that he traveled at all. Creation is good. Fruit is good.
He peels another and picks a round, pony-hair
#4 brush, dips it in the water glass, and begins
his next painting.

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The Image archive is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

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