The Enigma We Answer by Living.

The Enigma We Answer by Living

   Einstein didn't speak as a child
   waiting till a sentence formed and
   emerged full-blown from his head.

   I do the thing, he later wrote, which
   nature drives me to do. Does a fish
   know the water in which he swims?

   This came up in conversation
   with a man I met by chance,
   friend of a friend of a friend,

   who passed through town carrying
   three specimen boxes of insects
   he'd collected in the Grand Canyon--

   one for mosquitoes, one for honeybees,
   one for butterflies and skippers,
   each lined up in a row, pinned and labeled,

   tiny morphologic differences
   revealing how adaptation
   happened over time. The deeper down

   he hiked, the older the rock
   and the younger
   the strategy for living in that place.

   And in my dining room the universe
   found its way into this man
   bent on cataloguing each innovation,

   though he knows it will all disappear--
   the labels, the skippers, the canyon.
   We agreed then, the old friends and the new,

   that it's wrong to think people are a thing apart
   from the whole, as if we'd sprung
   from an idea out in space, rather than emerging

   from the sequenced larval mess of creation
   that binds us with the others,
   all playing the endgame of a beautiful planet

   that's made us want to name
   each thing and try to tell
   its story against the vanishing.

From Genius Loci by Alison Hawthorne Deming Copyright 2005 by Alison Hawthorne Deming. Used by permission of Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.