For the Sake of Retrieval (audio only)
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Metamorphosis: 1680
I paint flowers decorated with caterpillars.
I want to inquire into everything that exists and find
out how it began.
out how it began.
—Maria Sibylla Merian
2017
Lunar Eclipse
Mt. Rainier National Park
2016
Evolution
How, Alan Turing thought, does the soft-walled,
jellied, symmetrical cell
become the asymmetrical horse? It was just before dusk,
the sun’s last shafts doubling the fence posts,
all the dark mares on their dark shadows. It was just
after Schrodinger’s What is Life,
not long before Watson, Franklin, Crick, not long before
supper. How does a chemical soup,
he asked, give rise to a biological pattern? And how
does a pattern shift, an outer ear
gradually slough its fur, or a shorebird’s stubby beak
sharpen toward the trout?
2016