From the first, in seas and on mucky land,
creatures moved too fast and died too quickly
to notice, but all around them, in them,
novelties sloshed and budded. Eyes, lungs, sleep, fear.
Structural reinforcement
of the vertebrae in a tail, serrated edges
of a carnivore’s teeth, a velvet of capillaries spread
over panels jutting from a slow-moving hummock.
Here pillars of flesh pursue mountains of flesh,
scaly necks heave faces with lidless eyes
to the glare overhead, and, dodging underfoot,
something small has grown armor on its thorax,
or a long and flexible sting,
something smaller has worked out camouflage,
something tiny secretes a burning poison,
and something else has a wet and wiggly nose,
but chiefly it has hair. It has been learning
about tangles and mats and waking with squashed
and rubbed-up fur on the side it likes to sleep on, and that with regard
to working the hind spurs as combs there is
one right way and several wrong. This is the ancestor
of a girl in knee-sprung yellow pajamas
hugging her flattened bear. We know because
when at night the creature curls up
to the lullaby of the springy sound in its guts,
it fits its tail around the tender nose
to hoard warmth, but also to smell itself,
and it rubs its downy bellyskin against its feet
in an unnecessary movement to be known as nestling:
a refinement of the urge to avoid sheer misery
that is worthy of admiration,
which will not be developed for ages.