Science

Then it was the future, though what’s arrived

isn’t what we had in mind, all chrome and

cybernetics, when we set up exhibits

in the cafeteria for the judges

to review what we’d made of our hypotheses.

The class skeptic (he later refused to sign

anyone’s yearbook, calling it a sentimental

degradation of language) chloroformed mice,

weighing the bodies before and after

to catch the weight of the soul,

wanting to prove the invisible

real as a bagful of nails. A girl

who knew it all made cookies from euglena,

a one-celled compromise between animal and plant,

she had cultured in a flask.

We’re smart enough, she concluded,

to survive our mistakes, showing photos of farmland,

poisoned, gouged, eroded. No one believed

he really had built it when a kid no one knew

showed up with an atom smasher, confirming that

the tiniest particles could be changed

into something even harder to break.

And one whose mother had cancer (hard to admit now,

it was me) distilled the tar of cigarettes

to paint it on the backs of shaven mice.

She wanted to know what it took,

a little vial of sure malignancy,

to prove a daily intake smaller

than a single aspirin could finish

something as large as a life. I thought of this

because, today, the dusky seaside sparrow

became extinct. It may never be as famous

as the pterodactyl or the dodo,

but the last one died today, a resident

of Walt Disney World where now its tissue samples

lie frozen, in case someday we learn to clone

one from a few cells. Like those instant dinosaurs

that come in a gelatin capsule—just add water

and they inflate. One other thing this

brings to mind. The euglena girl won first prize

both for science and, I think, in retrospect, for hope.

Source: Science and Other Poems (Louisiana State University Press, 1994)