Two Fathers

[Terreson]

In a conversation thread Ros suggested I put out a science related poem. Here is a recent one standing just this side of getting dumped into the morgue file. All are invited to slash and burn it. One note of warning maybe. Anyone inclined to closed-form verse is bound to find this thing an ugly bastard child of poetry. And maybe it is.

Two Fathers

“There is no science, no wisdom,
life has been lost from the day one thing
became known.”
Antonin Artaud

Man, I’ve been beating my brains lately, sorely missing
places closer to where poetry’s head proceeds.
Okay, so the fault is mine. I have insisted
on getting taught the art of inseminating queens.
Grafting the major girl I got down. Anybody can
with right royal jelly, with feeling for right age larvae,
rightly manufactured swarm conditions in cell builder;
and the noon steadiness of practiced fingers
to scoop her soft larval self from bottom of six sided cup.

Beekeepers’ wives graft for queens all the time;
nurse bees, fooled, automatically feed, then seal
the soon to be virgin girls in pinnacle pendant homes.
Twelve days max. and the chewed through, emergent chorus line.

Damn right I want more.
It is an exacting art, this thing of I.I.
(instrumental insemination),
with no allowance under microscope for
approximate close-to-right-touch, still the near miss.
Either Queen Mellifera is sperm tooled rich or she is not.
She either oviduct accepts and passes sperm cell through and to
spermatheca or she will not
(in her story viability is determining).
My bad, of course, but right here a poet’s
lizard brain registers interstice home of Beauty.

What beats against brain’s left-soft side is this:
what the scientist insists I get if I want to make life:

in germ cell there is gamete, the sex cell that divides;
in nucleus there is chromosomal, zippered string unzippered,
each half-string a necklace, gene beaded with
double helix, the spiral staircase locking codes, A,C,T,G,
A w/ T, G w/ C and in forever partner pairs;
then DNA’s enzyme and protein patterning
to make in sets of sequence threes, describing
the language, and life the self-insistent morph,
looking to pair, sperm w/ egg, zippering up again.
Then suddenly I get the indiscrete moment in early embryo
that does not set my germ cells only and apart
from fertile queen, her thousands of offspring, or her
anciently divided, ancestral wasp locked in amber now.

So I figure I got two fathers. The one I saw murdered,
mourned him and loved. The other I killed, still love and mourn,
who keeps in resonance, and the Horus scent down the corridor.

Terreson

[David]

Hurrah for the ugly bastard children of poetry. I like this, although no doubt I'm only stating the obvious when I comment on the general prosiness of it. Still, let's not be too strait-laced about this sort of thing. As a reading experience, classified however you like, I did enjoy it. And I love the chorus line image.

The leap to mythology at the end eluded me, though. Two fathers? Horus? Wha? Do tell.

Cheers

David

[Terreson]

Thanks, David, for commenting. Thanks especially for the latitude shown. The two fathers motif is not as much a leap as first might seem to be the case. I say motif because it is actually led up to in the body of the poem. Many years ago, decades really, I first read a Goethe poem called "Art and Nature." The poem looks to resolve a certain conflict the poet faces. Nature, in the poem, is emblematic of freely expressed emotion. Art is emblematic of expression subject to form-control. My poem also establishes an internalized conflict, one between poetry and science. Thus the two fathers, what, for me at least, resonates in the Isis, Osiris, Set, and Horus story.

I suppose there were other thoughts at play. Such as that honey bee drones are parthenogenetically conceived, with, so to speak, queen mother also being its father. And the many genetic relationships in a colony among workers who can be supersisters, half-sisters, or full sisters, depending upon the semen source(s). But that would go too far afield. Thanks again.

Tere

[David]

I really don't know the Isis / Osiris / Horus / Set story. Just showing my ignorance there. I'll look it up, also the Goethe poem. I've read a bit of Goethe in my time - even went through a brief phase of learning some by heart, to recite whilst on a walking holiday in Germany - but I don't remember that one.

Cheers

David