Evolution
The first insects flapped stubby, wasteful appendages.
Starved of attention they took to water, became boatmen,
trained every day, blue with cold, each mark rewarded,
returning to the banks with ready wings.
The dinosaur's dunce's hat slipped forward, became a beak.
Tarred and feathered, he was pushed off the college wall.
In that cartoon moment before looking down, avoiding your bold gaze,
he flew. We talked. The rest is history - accumulated detail, not science.
Besides, the eye's evolution is impossible. It must have known
what it wanted, budding from the brain, filling with liquid, saving,
like rockpools, the last high tide, re-opening a fortnight before birth,
the two of us anxious, at the hospital three days early, turned away.
The way synapses change when we learn is an adaption
of the body's healing process, as if ignorance were once a wound.
Even now, there's much we still don't know. Fossil evidence is rare,
the change too quick from lover to parent, baby to schoolgirl.
We dream about the lost flesh, wear smooth what little faith we have,
rediscovering how each step ahead's a broken fall, learning as we go,
buying keep-fit videos, having lost the walking reflex in the first month.
But had we been wrong back then, we wouldnÕt be together now.
Our daughter's already bored by Punch and Judy, our yearly honeymoons.
She's shy of baring her flat chest on the beach,
she'd rather watch TV while we explore beneath the cliffs, read in the sun.
At evenings her bedroom door's so often shut.
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