I'm going to assume that I've gotten all the hits from friends I'm going to get today, so this counts as tomorrow's post. And look! It's a poem! Built from snippets from various science websites. Enjoy.
Questions of the Man with Small Pains
After dinner with friends he says
that he can’t look at the past
with its uncertain loves and sciences.
He says things like, “What were the uses
of water germander, the corpses of badgers
and thieves? What were the uses
of phylogenetic analysis, missed opportunities
of shot deer and mangled cousins?”
These questions fall onto the table
like ball bearings. The friend who laughs
knows that water germander
is good for inflammatory diseases,
helps men who can only piss
by drops. The friend who dated
the sister of another friend knows
that thief’s corpses were the only corpses
that could be dissected by Oxford dons,
but he forgets how many generations ago.
Everyone at the table agrees
on the uses of phylogenetic analysis.
The friend who is in the kitchen
cannot stop thinking about missed opportunities.
He could have patched a manatee skeleton
to a thief’s skeleton and made the skeleton
of a mermaid. He thinks
that if water germander weren’t rare
he could make from it a most singular cordial
that could comfort and make merry the heart.
He thinks he should have gotten that first deer.
He thinks he should never have called that girl back,
not after that whole month, and he should not
have asked where she’d been the day before.
By now, the candles are shuddering
like diseases and the speaker touches
the stones of olives. “I have a cousin,”
he says, “Who will not work again.
There is nothing to make him whole.”
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