Taxon

In three-hundred years when basically

not much has changed, but we contract

the word ‘it’s’ differently, and all the sea

anemones have raised their heads and split

their necks to swim away as jellyfish,

what will we ever say to all the uncountable

let’s say twenties of disputed subspecies

we had left unnamed for later? Say

that we have not ignored their sacrifice

of anonymity, but were waiting for such concrete

evidence as may be found by then to classify

in base pairs changes that escape translation

over centuries: that we must let such loving

use of nomenclature repartition arguments,

ease the joints of language, carry

forth some barely-understood genetic richness

as might benefit posterity. Say to let the nerves

meander through our skeletons, drop

the silent spaces from our words, and fall

away without an antecedent into observation.

We’ll take the pulse of newer languages

as evidence of thoughts we can’t express,

but must have grasped by gentle computation.

The rest we only speculate: the use of words

in sentences transcribed from thoughts, the names

for differences we only half-perceive,

and all the unfelt subtleties of shifting taxa.

Samuel Wronoski: “My work has appeared or is forthcoming in the journals After the Pause, (who have nominated my poem 'The Reviews Are In' for Sundress Press's Best of the Net anthology), Eunoia Review, Fulcrum, and The Boston Compass, among others. When not writing poetry, I am working towards my PhD in computer science at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.”