Poetry for The G-Nome Project

Hybrids (1992)

By Michael Carey

Aren’t we all hybrids

of dirt and sky,

of grass and wind

and animals?

What pushes light

pushes us

from the darkness,

corn from a seed,

consciousness from a stone.

As above, so below

and below that too.

Heaven waits

wherever we are,

whatever we’ve become,

even when we are finished

becoming

us.

Untitled (1992)

By Michael Carey

It may be true, we may be half God

and half dying animal, still

we are not as important as it seems.

Nothing dies but us

and what needs us

to survive, only each

particular incarnation.

This porcelain water

stands for everything

seen through different eyes,

the myopia of science. It is

the gene pool of the open prairie,

and man’s wild attempt to stir it.

Stand with reverence before its

strange reflection. Feel what

you are and own. Know

you will dissolve eventually

into this pool of stone.

St. Barbara McClintock of the G-Nomes

By Ann Struthers

Protecting the four corners of Molecular Biology,

terra-cotta creatures, known by artists

for centuries in other forms—gargoyles

from the Renaissance? disguised angels?

gods of Aruba cloaked in Mayan robes?

these G-nomes, regulator genes, controller genes,

color conductors, turn maize kernels red,

black, pale yellow, ride protein horses,

are heritage policepersons,

O, scientists,

remember unscientific brainlock that kept

Barbara McClintock’s work from recognition

thirty years. She found maize ring chromosomes

that break, repair themselves,

alleles that jump like grasshoppers, kick

up their heels, pack their DNA, move

although it wasn’t proven until

the electron microscope. She asked herself

“What would I do if I were a maize G-nome?”

Get into the kernel’s starchy white heart.

Alone she maps the first controlling element,

develops a “slightly scandalous suggestion”

contrary to the accepted theory that genes

were strung together like a train on a track

Linear and fixed. Barbara finds

they jump the rails, uncouple

themselves, recouple, insert themselves

between other elements, turn other genes

off and on like signal lights.

Her powers of perception so refined she knows

each plant by name, records each day’s differences.

Under a microscope, sees “internal parts

of the chromosomes.” She “...feels as if

I were right down there and these were my friends.”

Dismissed by authorities in her field,

a geneticist, calls her “just an old bag

who’s been hanging around Cold Spring Harbor too long.”

Lederberg called her “either crazy or a genius.”

She asks him and his colleagues to leave

her lab, throws them out for their arrogance,

“She feels she has crossed a desert alone

and no one has followed.”

Thomas Aquinas saw seraphim.

Robert Millikan saw electrons.

Albert Einstein saw mathematics,

envisioned travelling on a beam of light.

Barbara McClintock sees chromosomes,

sees their parts, skittish G-nomes,

“after synapses...they elongate, get fatter,

...after anaphase in the first division...

they just unravel...second division...

chromosomes elongate--hugely long arms coming down...”

constantly changing; “...they can do anything.”

Saint Thomas, Robert, Albert, Barbara,

and four G-nomes above our heads,

protect these classrooms, greenhouse, laboratories,

empower all the microscopes, magnify the pure light

of reason, shower largess for unconventional

science; encourage the open mind.

The darkness opens a little from time to time.

Gaia: Mosaic on the Floor of the Microbiology Building at Iowa State University

By William Irwin Thompson

Look in a dog’s eyes.

The world he sees is colorless.

Your eyes have three types of conical receptors.

His only have two, so he is left forever in moonlight.

You can’t tell him how brilliant the air is

after a rain when the sun shines through it.

How do you explain a rainbow? I don’t mean

reflection or light simply bent into the spectrum,

but the shimmer and glimmer on deep down things.

And a bird’s eye has four.

What does she see, I wonder,

that we miss, and what about

the others who have more? What

interpenetrating worlds do they see

falling from a tangle of hair,

from the soft lowering of voice?

What universe, what consciousness

dwells in a cell, in the spirochete?

What mind binds the heavens?