Biology

Biology

Junior year biology, the seniors already committed

To the community college across town, or, the rare ones,

To U of I, our teacher droned on as if our lives depended

Upon the difference between mitosis and meiosis,

Which, of course, they did, though did we have to

Know how? I can say for certain now no. Never

Was he not covered in chalk, the whitest man alive,

The board itself bored of holding handwriting

We couldn’t read. But taught good manners over

Years of Middle Western porch talk, I tried to pay

The tax of attention. So what if I was overdrawn?

Even then I knew that knowing how wasn’t what

I was put here for, but for drawing connections between

One thing and another seemingly unrelated thing,

Which is what Weil says the purpose of language is

In Gravity and Grace, the title itself proving her theory.

Back to our teacher. The first day he’d told us that

He had epilepsy, then drew his own brain on the board

To show the trade war between the hemispheres of his.

He said he might suffer a seizure at any time and we

Should stay ready to slip something between his teeth

To keep him from biting off his tongue, an outcome

We wouldn’t have been all that upset by. One day

(you think I am going to say that he had a seizure)

Jeremy Weber and I set a dead fly on the plastic slip

Thin as water’s skin (the slide, I mean, not the fly,

Which was one of those fat summer flies that lives

On into autumn in high school biology classrooms)

And called him over excitedly to see. Now it is I

Who see him in my likely unreliable memory staring

Far off through the binoculars of the microscope

As if at distant peaks, pull back, focus, peer again,

Then say, “Well you've really found something here.”

Then there was the time he handed out a test with

The answers on the back and praised our perfection.

He’d drink black coffee dangerously out of beakers,

Dangerously because he once drank hydrochloric acid,

The only time we ever saw him froth at the mouth.

We all woke up a little that day, as we did the day

The dissections began. Wielding scalpels in hands

Clumsy with latex gloves, we cut open feral cats

The shelter had donated, the fact that they were

Being used to teach high school kids the difference

Between the gall bladder and the spleen making 

Whoever’s job it was to gas them feel less guilty.

I had to pick at my reduced lunch with fingers that

Stank of formaldehyde. The fetal pigs were more

Horrifying. They looked like the babies a few girls

In the class had already had, legs splayed lewdly,

Blondish eyelashes, slinky-like snout. Years later

We heard he’d been caught looking at porn 

In the school library. I can just see him peering

At the screen with the same intensity with which

He peered at our fly, the dour librarian behind him.

Maybe he murmured something about how it had to

Do with anatomy, which wouldn’t have been a lie.

I don’t blame him for wanting what we can’t deny

All of us want, his hand pale with chalk cupping

The gray mouse with its infinite tail while the girl,

So still she could have been taken for dead, lay

Under the gaze of two men who gazed at her

Through intricate machines man has invented,

Camera and computer. Gravity and grace.