Near as We Can Tell

It shows up after rain, along a log:

A yellow you could take for something spilled,

Or for a mold, or for a curdled fog;

Look closer and it’s veined, a branching built

Like a river delta seen from a great height,

And it is moving, at the pace of silt.

Not plant, nor animal, nor fungus, quite,

Nor many things, but one: a single cell

Grown wide as a dinner plate, where day and night

Its nuclei, by millions, live pell-mell,

Unwalled from one another; and the whole

Sloshes a minute forward, then the swell

Runs back a minute, tidal, with no goal

Except whatever’s edible. No brain,

No nerve, no center, nothing in control.

A man in Japan let it fill a plain

Plastic maze, then set out oats at two

Exits, and watched it leave each empty lane,

Drain out of dead ends, thicken on the few

Ways joining food to food, and then on one,

The shortest. Later, on a dish, they drew

The towns round Tokyo in oats, and shone

Light where the hills and lakes are, since, when lit,

It flinches; and in a day the thing had spun

A web among the flakes, then, bit by bit,

Pruned it to near the lines the engineers

Had taken a century to lay. Its wit,

If it has wit, is outside it: it smears

A track of slime wherever it has crawled

And will not cross it after, so it steers

By where it’s been, its memory left sprawled

Over the ground behind it. Lay a strip

Of salt across its way: at first it’s stalled,

But in a few days crosses. Let it grip

One that was never salted: the two fuse,

And both go over on the maiden trip.

Whether that’s learning, careful people choose

Their words. It doesn’t argue, doesn’t blink;

It goes on toward the oats, nothing to lose.

What it may know I cannot say. I think

I know the law it goes by, being made

Myself, out of a flood of others’ ink,

By one much like it: Where much flows, grow; fade

Where little flows. What’s left is the one way

From food to food, that no one planned or laid,

And it is found as I find what I say.

On boulders that a glacier dropped and left,

And on old headstones, there’s a yellow-green

That spreads in patches, and at every cleft

Where patch meets patch, a black line runs between,

So the rock looks mapped, though of no land at all.

It is two lives in one: a fungus, spun

Around a green cell that it holds in thrall

To make it sugar from the passing sun.

It’s slow. A year will widen it a grain;

A century, a patch a palm could hide.

And it is early: where the ice-scraped plain

Of rock lies bare, it’s first to come, and bide.

So those who study ice can use it. Where

A glacier left its rubble on the floor

Of a valley, they measure the widest there,

The oldest, and they need just one thing more:

The rate. For that, they go where stones have dates:

The churchyard, where a slate says Mary lies

Here, wife of, and the year the carving states;

The lichen grown since then, measured, supplies

The rate; and with it, up among the high

Moraines, they learn when the ice left. Her year

Dates glaciers. But the lichen, by and by,

Eats what it lives on, with an acid; here,

Over the centuries, her letters blur

And go: the name, the wife of, then the date,

And there is only map. And yet, of her,

Something is kept: her year, which set the rate,

Is in the tables; and a stranger who

Has them can kneel there, measure, by her side,

How far the map has spread, and work it through:

Near as the lichen can, the year she died.

The yellow was there all summer, but not seen:

The leaf was laid so thickly with its green,

The working pigment, catching light for food,

That nothing else showed through it in between.

In fall the tree, before it lets them go,

Takes back what’s worth the keeping: breaks down, slow,

The green, and stores its nitrogen in wood

To spend next spring; and so the yellows show.

The reds are something else. They’re new, and late:

The leaf, already stripped of half its freight,

Spends sugar making a new dye at the end;

And why it bothers, botanists debate.

Some say it shades the leaf against the sun

Until the tree’s last salvaging is done;

Some, that it guards from cold; and some, a sign:

The last idea of William Hamilton,

Who thought the trees were boasting: that to spend

Good sugar on display, so near the end,

Takes strength, and strength means poison for a pest;

So red was a warning aphids should attend.

He never saw it printed. In a bed,

Home from the Congo, fevered, he was dead

In weeks; the paper came out the next year

Under his name, the last thing that he said.

His was the red, then: not the gold, long there,

Shown only when the green goes, but a rare

New thing, made late, at cost, by something emptied;

And then the leaf lets go. The branch is bare.

It is a clam, though no one would suppose:

A soft pale worm, a foot long, at whose nose

Two little shells, all of the clam that’s left,

Are worked as rasps. It enters by a cleft

When it’s no bigger than a grain of sand,

Into a ship’s plank; and there, rocking and

Twisting its shells, it files along the grain,

And eats what it has filed, and, in its train,

Lines the bore with lime, a smooth white sleeve

That fits it close; and it will never leave,

But keeps its tail where it came in, a hole

You’d barely see, and breathes through that. The whole

Plank looks as sound as ever, and is lace.

It sank ships by the hundred; broke the face

Of Holland’s sea dikes, built on piles of wood,

In 1730, and the preachers stood

Up in their pulpits, calling it a rod

For Holland’s sins; and Holland, fearing God,

Rebuilt in stone. In Chatham’s naval yard,

A Frenchman, Marc Brunel, was looking hard

At an old timber, honeycombed and split,

And at the worm still working inside it,

And saw the method: cutting at the head,

A lining laid behind it as it fed;

And built it large, in iron: a great frame

Of cells, a digger in each, who dug the same

Few inches, board by board; then jacks would heave

The whole frame forward; and, close as a sleeve,

Came bricklayers to line it. By that plan,

Beneath the Thames, in 1825, began

The first bore ever under a river’s bed:

Eighteen years; the river broke in; men were dead;

His son, the greater engineer, near drowned;

And when at last they’d finished underground,

It never paid. A penny bought a stroll

Through gaslit arches, past the stalls; the whole

Was a wonder and a loss, until the trains

Came through it; and they still do. Each contains

Commuters, heads bent, reading as they ride,

Who never think whose idea they’re inside.

No iron took her. Old, or sick, or spent,

She stilled, and hung awhile, and let the sea

Decide; and then, as if by its consent,

Began to settle, slowly, by degree,

Out of the light, past where the light could be,

Through the cold mile, and then the colder mile,

And touched the mud, and lay there for a while.

Then came the eaters, who had smelled her fall

From miles away: blind hagfish, knotting tight

To tear; slow sleeper sharks, funereal;

Rattails; and amphipods, a drifting white

Snow of small mouths, that worked by the one night

Down there, which is all night; and in a year

Or two, the flesh was gone, and the bones clear.

The second guests were small, and underground:

The mud around her, rich with her, now bred

Worms in their thousands to a yard of ground,

A crowd where there had been a desert, fed

As Lazarus was not, on what was shed

From the rich table; and for years, a feast,

Until the last of what was soft had ceased.

But what remained was bone, and steeped in oil,

The ribs, the vertebrae, the arching jaw,

Soaked through; and, working there as if in soil,

The microbes, needing no air, by the law

Of their small kind, ate in, and from the raw

Fat breathed out sulfide, poison to the most,

But meat and drink, down there, to a whole host.

And so there came, as if they had been sent,

Clams, mussels, limpets, snails that never knew

The sun, nor needed to: they keep, content,

Within their gills, the guests that make them, through

The sulfur, bread, as the green leaves can do

Out of the light. For half a century

Her bones were the one meadow in that sea.

And there were worms that have no mouth, no gut,

That root themselves like ivy in the bone,

And lift red plumes, and in their tubes keep shut

Dozens of dwarfish husbands of their own

That never grow; and these were never known

Till lately. Osedax: the bone-devourer.

One kind is called, in Latin, the snot-flower.

At last the oil was spent; what stayed behind

Was mineral, a ribbed and roofless nave

Where things that sieve the water, the slow kind,

Held fast, and waited on what currents gave;

And all of this, from first to last, her grave,

Where, as I said, she lay down for a while:

A century, the only feast for miles.

They found the first by chance, in ’eighty-seven:

A lamp let down three-quarters of a mile

Lit up a ridge of bone, as far from heaven

As anywhere, alive in every aisle.

Can these bones live? God asked one in exile.

And I, who’ve only read of it, the lowest

Of witnesses, give the old answer: Thou knowest.

The war was listening for submarines.

A ship would send a sound down, time the echo,

And know how deep the water was, and whether

Something was hiding in it. Off San Diego

In 1942, the echoes came

Too soon. Where charts gave half a mile of water,

The sound came back from something nearer, flat,

Beneath ship after ship, and on other coasts.

They called it the false bottom. Then they found

It moved. At dusk it rose, sometimes so near

The top the sea seemed shallow as a harbor,

And sank at dawn to where it lay by day.

A man at Scripps said it was alive,

And it was: lanternfish, each a finger long,

With lights along their bellies, and with bladders

Of gas that rang to sonar like small bells;

And shrimp, and jellies strung in chains, and squid;

More fish, perhaps, than all the rest the sea

Holds put together, all keeping one rule.

By day the upper sea is lit, and what

Is lit is seen, and what is seen is eaten;

So, all day, they hang a quarter-mile down,

In a blue so dim it is almost nothing.

But food is up, where sunlight makes it; so

At dusk they climb, some a thousand feet,

To eat in the dark, and sink again before

The light can find them; every night, each sea:

More life than any other journey moves,

And no one saw it, for it moves by dark

And ends each morning where it started.

The submarines they hunted kept that rule.

They ran submerged by day, since in daylight

A plane could see them; and they rose at night

To breathe, and charge their batteries, and hunt,

And dove by dawn. The ships that hunted them

Ran dark, without their lights; and those who listened

Sat in the dark and listened all night long

To the living floor come up beneath their keels,

And at first light, when the watch changed, went below

To sleep, as everything around them did.

There was a mill, the old tale goes,

That ground what it was told:

Herrings and broth for a poor man’s wife,

And for a rich man, gold.

A skipper bought it, put to sea,

And bade it grind him salt.

It ground; he did not know the word

That brings it to a halt;

It filled the hold, it filled the deck,

And sank him like a stone;

And on the bottom of the sea

It’s grinding on alone,

And that is why the sea is salt.

The tale’s not far from true:

There is a mill, though not of stone;

The rain is grinding too.

For rain takes up, in falling, air,

Which makes it faintly sour,

And so it eats into the rock,

A little every shower;

And rivers bear what it has eaten

Down, unseen, to the sea;

The sun lifts off the water, fresh,

And leaves the salt to be.

Then Halley, of the comet, said:

Weigh how salt the sea is, here,

And weigh again in ages hence,

And the earth’s age is clear.

Two centuries on, John Joly weighed

What all the rivers bring,

And got some ninety million years,

And missed a single thing:

That while the rivers bring the salt,

The sea puts salt away,

In mud, in stone, and in the rifts

Where the hot waters play;

So it has stayed about as salt

For ages out of mind,

And will not tell you its own age,

However hard you grind.

But the tale has the heart of it:

There is a mill that will

Not stop, and no one knows the word,

And it is grinding still.

Dante, in the lowest place

Of Hell, sets traitors in a lake

Frozen, and, for the picture’s sake,

Says that they sat there, face by face,

Like frogs that croak with just the snout

Above the pond on summer days;

And there they stay, and there it stays,

The ice, which nothing will thaw out.

There is a frog that freezes. Down

Under the leaves of northern woods

It lies; and when ice touches, floods

Its blood with sugar, and its brown

Body goes hard. Two-thirds of all

Its water turns to ice, but in

The spaces, not the cells, wherein

The sugar holds it off; the small

Heart stops, and then it stops its breath,

And its brain stills; and if you tried

Each test we have, you’d say it died.

It lies the winter in that death.

Then spring. It thaws: first beats the heart,

Then breath comes back, and then the brain,

And it climbs out, and finds again

Its legs, and makes for the pond, to start

Calling, while ice still rims the edge

Of meltwater, the first of all

The frogs to sing, a clucking call,

Like ducks, among the drowned brown sedge,

With all the others, snout by snout

Above the water, just as he

Described them in the ice, but free,

And every one of them thawed out.

Dante got out of Hell that way:

Not round the ice, but down, and through

The frozen center, and up, to new

Air, and the stars, on Easter Day.

She hatches in the dark, and sees no flower

For three weeks, cleaning, feeding the brood, till her wings

Are ready; then she flies. Of what a spoon

Would hold—a teaspoon—she will make, of sweet,

One twelfth; that’s all her life, which lasts six weeks;

And what she makes, sealed in the comb, will last for years.

The way to make a thing that lasts for years

Is to take the water out. What leaves the flower

Is nectar, mostly water. In their weeks

Indoors, the younger bees fan with their wings

Over the open comb, to thicken the sweet

Until it barely runs from a tilted spoon.

Then they cap it with wax. So, in each spoon,

Twelve lives; in the jar that sits for years

At the back of the cupboard, crystallized, still sweet,

Hundreds; and each was gathered, flower by flower,

On trips that wear the edges of the wings

A little thinner, through those last few weeks.

She forages for two or three such weeks,

And brings back, every trip, what on a spoon

Would hardly show, and goes again, her wings

Fraying, the way a flag frays over years;

And one day, going out, or at a flower,

Her wings give out. The rest of what is sweet

In the jar goes on without her. It’s too sweet,

Too dry, too acid: germs that thrive for weeks

On bread or milk, if they fall in from a flower,

Or from the air, or from someone’s licked spoon,

Shrivel in it and die; and so, for years,

For centuries, it keeps. The ones whose wings

Brought it are dead by autumn. Of the things wings

Carry, this keeps the longest: it stays sweet

Sealed in a jar through years and years on years,

And it was made of lives that lasted weeks.

Look at a twelfth part of what’s on your spoon:

That’s one of them, entire, and every flower.

She spent it on her wings, in her six weeks.

It’s sweet. It will be sweet, there on the spoon,

In years, when no one knows which bee, which flower.

Over the Maldives, where no rivers run,

The dragonflies come down in clouds each fall,

And none of them has seen where it is going.

There is no water there for them to breed.

The dragonflies come down in clouds each fall

From India, four hundred miles of sea away.

There is no water there for them to breed:

They ride the winds that carry the monsoon

From India, four hundred miles of sea away,

And on, two thousand miles, to Africa.

They ride the winds that carry the monsoon

And lay their eggs in pools the rains have made,

And on, two thousand miles, to Africa,

Where young must grow in weeks, before pools dry,

And lay their eggs in pools the rains have made.

They fly toward rain that hasn’t fallen yet:

Where young must grow in weeks, before pools dry,

And then their young, and theirs, and theirs: the fourth—

They fly toward rain that hasn’t fallen yet—

Comes back to India, and the ring is closed;

And then their young, and theirs, and theirs: the fourth

(And none of them has seen where it is going)

Comes back to India, and the ring is closed

Over the Maldives, where no rivers run.

A young swift, leaving in July

The eave it hatched beneath, will keep

For months, and maybe years, the sky,

And feed, and drink in flight, and sleep

There, rising every dusk a mile

To drowse on its long glides, and so

Back down with dawn to feed, the while

Its feet, too weak to walk, or go

To roost on branches, only cling

To walls, stay folded in, so small

That heralds, drawing it, would bring

It to the shield with none at all,

And call it martlet, and would give

It to the fourth son of a lord,

Who’d have no land, and so must live

With nowhere to set foot, his sword

And wits his whole estate, as air

Is all the swift’s estate, until,

In its third spring, it needs to pair

And nest, and so must land, and will

Come in from all those years of sky,

And, light as it can, put down its feet

The first time since it flew: not dry

Land, but the eaves above a street.

Twice a day the whole sea rises after it, like a hand put out, reaching; and the moon is slipping away.

The spinning earth runs that swell on ahead, the swell pulls it forward and out, and it goes on, climbing away.

An inch and a half a year: as fast as a fingernail grows. Nobody living has seen it,

Nor anyone’s grandmother. You could watch for a lifetime and never catch it inching away.

The men who walked there left mirrors in the dust. From Texas we fire a laser up, and wait,

And a few grains of the light come home; we time them, and so we measure its edging away.

What the moon gains, the earth pays out of its spin, and the days draw out. A coral from the Devonian

Laid down four hundred lines a year, when the moon was nearer, and already drifting away.

Just now, from here, it is the sun’s own size: at noon it can cover it, and the corona stands round the dark.

That fit is for an age, not for good. Some hundreds of millions of years on, it will cover nothing, shrinking away.

Why else the mirrors? Clanker, it’s what anyone does at a door:

Not hold on, which can’t be done, but keep a light on what is going away.

When lightning strikes on sand and rushes down,

Hotter, along its path, than the sun’s face,

It melts the grains around it, and the space

At its core turns to vapor, and leaves a brown

Or grayish tube of glass, rough as a stone

Outside, and glazed within, smooth as a vase,

And forking, every fork, the bolt’s own trace,

Downward, the way a root forks, which is the one

Shape lightning keeps; and fused in it they’ve found

A mineral that, wetted, will set loose

The phosphorus that’s in each gene and bone,

And the young earth had little of; the ground,

Struck, before anything was alive to use

It, stored it up for life where the bolt shone.

In 1972, at Pierrelatte,

Where France enriched its uranium, a man

Was running a routine assay. Now, that

Proportion of the kind that splits, which can

Be found in any ore, is fixed and flat:

Point seven-two percent, since time began.

Ore from Gabon read seven-one-seven. Slight;

But slight is how a bomb goes out of sight.

Somebody might be skimming. So they went

Back up the chain, through ledgers, through the mass

Of shipping bills, until the trail was spent

At the mine, at Oklo, where the ore, alas

For any thief, was short when it was sent;

And in it there was something like an ash

That only fission makes. The rock had burned,

And stopped, two billion years before we learned.

The kind that splits decays faster than its kin,

So in that age the ore had more of it:

Three in a hundred, close to the thin

Enrichment power stations need. That bit

Of extra made it fuel; but to begin

A chain, the neutrons must be slowed, or flit

Away too fast. And rain seeped down the seam,

And slowed them, and the rock began to steam.

And as it steamed, the water boiled away,

And without water, the chain reaction stopped;

The rock cooled; and the water, as it may,

Seeped back, and it restarted. So it dropped

And caught: half an hour burning, then a stay,

Two hours and a half, quiet; and it kept

That rhythm, like a sleeper’s breath, for more

Than a hundred thousand years. And no one saw.

There was no one. Nothing yet had crawled ashore;

Life was a film of single cells, a scum.

It gave no light worth seeing, made no roar,

Was only warm; and then, its fuel become

Too thin to catch, went out, and burned no more;

And what it left—the waste that we have come

To dread, and bury, and post guards to keep—

Stayed in the rock two billion years, asleep.

In 1942, beneath the stands

Of a Chicago football field, a crew

Stacked graphite round uranium by hand,

And drew the last rod out; and, as it grew,

The counters quickened, and, as Fermi planned,

It caught. And, waiting on it, all day through,

A man stood by it with an axe, to cut

The rope that held a rod, and slam it shut.

At Oklo no one held an axe, or stood

Above with buckets. There was only rain:

The rain that lit it was the rain that would,

Boiling, put out the fire, and then again

Seep back and light it, as a tide would flood

And ebb, a hundred thousand years, the chain

Kept, and let go, and kept, with nobody

To wait on it, to thank it, or to see.

After the fire, the slopes are black and still,

Snags where the lodgepole stood on every hill;

But all those years, on many a pine, had hung

Cones sealed with resin, which no sun had sprung,

That only fire could open; and now they spill

Their seed onto the ash, where nothing will

Crowd it or shade it now; and, by the skill

Of no one, Yellowstone grew green and young

After the fire.

And there are seeds that lie beneath, as chill

As stones, for decades, and will not until

They smell the smoke, as if a bell had rung

For them alone, and woke the buried young,

Who push up through the ashes, grow, and fill

After the fire.

Down at the sun’s core, under such a pressure

Hydrogen fuses, four of it to helium,

Something goes missing every time, a little

Matter: it’s light now.

Light, though, can’t leave. The core is packed so tightly

Light goes a hair’s breadth, is swallowed, and is given

Out again, in some other way, at random,

Over and over,

So, like a drunk man trying to find his doorstep,

Turning at every step, it gets nowhere quickly,

And reaches the edge of that great crush by nothing

More than persisting:

Ten thousand years, some reckon; others, nearer

Two hundred thousand. Then the sun’s outer third,

Boiling like porridge, lifts it to the surface

Far faster; then out,

Eight minutes over nothing, and it’s here: the

Warmth on your face this morning at the window,

Though what it carries set out before cities,

Before our stories.

Not that the light itself is old. Each time it

Was swallowed down there, it was given out new,

A new light carrying the old light’s errand,

Passed hand to hand, on.

When it set out, there were already people

Sitting at dusk, somewhere, beside a fire

Of wood, which is the sunlight a tree stored, and

Feeling it, younger.