One Blank, One Blurred
Quartet for Phylogenesis
By Maggie Wang
i.
On Saturday mornings, while I sleep in late,
he walks down to the cove and turns the sea over
in the palm of his hand.
When he comes back, he brings a pair of oysters
and a palace of salt across his knuckles.
We set the oysters over the fireplace,
where the sun will catch them later
and throw the room open like a hall of mirrors.
He sits, and I brush the salt away with my thumbs,
and the ocean falls in drops onto our carpet,
where a school of fish gathers in the weaving.
ii.
A Brazilian materials scientist writes a paper
about the glass in medieval French cathedrals
in which he finds that it would take
one times ten to the power of thirty-two years
for the glass to deform noticeably,
which is one trillion times the age of the universe.
The dolphins of the Indus and the Ganges
diverged from those of 长江 and La Plata
24 million years ago, which is two thousandths
of the age of the universe.
In Bihar, a calf emerges for air and slips back unnoticed,
its flanks the same shade as the fog over the water.
When the fog lifts, God will hoist his body
out of the depths with weary arms,
but the passers-by, busy plucking glass
from the riverbanks, won’t stop to watch.
iii.
A fisherman’s son gave him the camera,
fruit of a year’s labour in the city,
in exchange for saving his life.
He kept it in a wooden box under his bed,
tucked beside two rolls of film:
one blank, one blurred with the outline of some
nameless creature arching over the river downstream.
He imagined the film shown blurry on a big screen
a century from now, the image cracked
and the beast, a flag of truce draped across his back,
falling like a landslide into the water.
They could search all their lives and find no trace of it;
the blind learn to live by being invisible.
iv.
I am reading a book about frontiers
and picturing a company of friars picking their way
through the Amazon basin in 1637.
On our porch, a shipment of flour has exploded
and covered the yard in midsummer snow.
I try to imagine the flour as a layer of sediment
separating one era from another—
a border to stop the future from flowing backwards.
Someone has drawn a line on a map
and called it the mark of Heaven, but who is to say
that the rivers will not divert themselves to cross that line
or that the trees will not spread their roots on both sides?
Maggie Wang studies at the University of Oxford, where she leads the Oxford University Poetry Society. Her writing has appeared or will appear in Ruminate, Poetry Wales, Bedtime Stories for the End of the World, and elsewhere. She is a 2021 Ledbury Emerging Poetry Critic.
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