Evolution

Before eye and ear, whatever lump of blind muscle washed itself out of the ocean ached for plain survival. Nothing flashy. I think of this as I water the family garden, soil drinking up everything I offer it, then begging again. Days of merciless sun raisining all the flowers, petals curling inward, squeezing themselves to keep cool until they shrivel. By noon the birds quit their singing, except for one inexhaustible wren. Everything waiting for rain in a piss-poor mood. Walking home yesterday, I crossed a wasp’s path, waved it gently from my face. His steampunk body hissed at the joints as he wound skyward, then plunged his needle in me—once, on the wrist—as if to say: Don’t you recognize your own father? Then the marble of red and white, a bullseye blossoming from my skin. Never in my life had I been stung before, and I’m at the age now where the only new things that happen are deaths. But the pressure is dropping, goldfinches and blue jays and cardinals are painting the trees, rust black clouds sound themselves with peals like the sky is bumping over steel plates on some far-off freeway, and in the first gasp of lightning I swear I hear the tin spark, the humming from your forgotten lungs.