And Mars Passed Close To The Sun
I’m writing this in a hurry, bringing
its two ends
together to keep
the oil from the water, closing
it in on itself then watching
it wriggle. I’m
hoping to pip her
at the ribbon, before her own bomb
drops in the next number of Nature.
It’s been forever, or less,
they’ve claimed
archeobactin—
we’re in terribly close now,
the mitochondria rafts
in the single cell’s sargasso,
way way back at the business
end of biological
time. Life’s first
murk or sea-vent event or
pure accident—
must have cooked its own materials
whatever ingredients needed
for interior membrane walls.
‘Must have,’
‘somehow,’ always more
god where the gaps come from.
‘Eff that, she’d thought, back in ’01
and chased a suspicion the proteabacterin
had its mitts in the game
in heretofore unseen ways. Those ways
are known now. She knows them.
She has footage:
jittery, luminous,
smeary drip moving from earliest A
to A-1, or exactly home in a dark
the colour of migraines and horological
seizures, who knows, but without
signal or fanfare this lite-brite gloop
up and sheds a vesicle, pinches off
a piece or packet of itself, herniates
a bladder of
sub-self
that detaches, becomes a probe or
Trojan gift bag of lipids,
iron, and recipes for iron and I lost
grip of it back in the lobby of the Royal
York where her drawings helped none
but found it notable she and her lipids
colleague were using a garden of eden
metaphor as pedagogical tool over
dirty martinis
and male scientists
in herds all presumably thinking
them lab techs or just here with me,
biochemistry is a discipline as much
as anything is, half its time spent fending
off physics and the other zealots all
to prove life began shedding vesicles
and may end over soup in Zurich
or Houston, haemorrhaging thought
bubbles with plans for Baja after
presenting the team’s
paper in Nature.