We grew into creatures with thumbs, an appetite for meat, large brain-cases to conjugate verbs: about to be, desiring to have been, wishing to have had the capacity
to become. Going from social primates to ground-dwelling, swelling with pride and warfare, earning car-fare, telling bare-faced lies, kleptomaniacs of all we wish to have said,
     I stole
“myriad-minded” twice, trying to fathom the different forms of knowing, through body, brain, book, skin, eyes designed for facial recognition at 50 feet. Are we safe here? Slippery
underbelly, sub-synaptical concepts swerve into layers of reference, that’s why we wear shoes, exposed soles do no good when walking somewhere, having gone, about to pack to
     go,
predictable, like a water table. I hated the sevens, especially nine times seven, oddities of mind that make me me, and you have come to expect unfolding, unreeling spool,
     once known,
about to be forgotten and recycled in bits. My softest old orange sweatshirt in the rag-bin, scraps for a quilt, for shoe polish, window wash, gazing glassy-eyed through the re-glazed
bay window to find the too-bright gold-flatware of the Bay lying there, streaming and about to go cobalt. Archaea, single-celled without nuclei or organelles, thought to be
     extremophiles
(volcanic hot springs, salt lakes), now found in the mammalian gut, maybe earth’s oldest lineage. He said the problem with the financial markets is the lack of transparency,
everything too abstract, no product, no value. Human history, 200,000 years, a drop
in time’s bucket, paleoanthropologists argue over the archaic species, whether
     Neanderthals
coexisted with the lost branches, pygmy genome sequencing, other groups speaking click languages share some odd DNA sequences, ancestral history hidden in the mitochondria.
Orangutans predate the split, the point where the human line diverged, proto-primates appeared in the Paleocene, first hominids in the Miocene, Plesiadapis, an archaic primate
60 million years ago in Wyoming. Grooming builds not only social structure, but tactile relationships, skin to skin, how the mother meets the baby these days, back again to where
we were before the isolette. The monkeysphere is the number a primate can track in
her social group, and reflects the size of cortex, as it grows, so does verbal communication.
Now that we’re we, picking our nits and talking, roots and leaf, the chewy bark, babies clinging to the under-fur, swing and sit, launch and sleep, dreaming the circuits
of the excitable mind, going far, wire to wire, disinvited from the tree of being, fall
to ground. The gorilla mother carried her dead baby around for weeks, unwilling to give
it up, unable to comprehend? or waiting for resuscitation? We recite prayers waiting for the coma to pass. It never does, we carry it inside, unknowing, glued synapse, the dead
and held collective ghost we resemble in our darker moments. Whish of skirt on floor in the unlit hallway, night breeze blowing before sun up, before the air rinses into
lavender and cerulean, and our lidded eyes open to what is and isn’t, one branch, in the attic, a painted tree, grandmother’s maiden name, Lemon, branching off
of Colton, Foster, twig and thumb. Further forms of being, is that up? or have we merely forgotten the fullness of unconscious being, breathing in and the tree blows,
embryonic gill fronds, we all owned them in our prelapsarian archaic days, before daylight, before The Beagle’s voyage, the thin-inked notebooks of tortoises and
Galapagonian boobies, Darwin’s concept of tree just sprouting, now unteachable
in Kansas, vertebral column, fingerprints, the infant’s random grin, one merged creature.
Metempsychosis, we recycle? Once I met him, psychosis became background music. Begin in one shape then become another, experiencing a death in between or not.
Metamorphosis, separation is amnesia, Mrs. Orpheus sinking back into blackness, while the singing goes on in her absence, peculiar intertwining of words and music,
particular melody, particulate phonemes, particle accelerator of the mind, amygdala, almond-shape, point where the limbic’s archaic emotions meet up with perception,
doors flung open, baby melds with adult, nucleus of association, slung out on the long wires, glossy myelin sheaths, full of the nothing we came from, the everything we
aspired to before realizing it probably wasn’t going to happen. Instead, down this side-chain, daily being and dinner, lo mein and sea weed, flavored with black egg,
parental DNA saturating the templates of reaction and interaction, we came to a fork in the road, arriving here, stucco and red tile, bay fog, monkey mien. I remember you.