The Singing

"The idea that you could pluck [a gene] from your body and take it away for study was as absurd to many of Morgan's peers as the idea that scientists today might capture a stray thought and examine it under a microscope."

--Bill Bryson

"Deputy Police Chief Robert Lee told The [Wichita KS] Eagle on Monday that the department expects to have more than 1,300 DNA samples (taken to eliminate possible suspects in the serial murder investigation) destroyed.  They likely will be incinerated."

--arranged from The Wichita Eagle

"Pickleheads with insect eyes," a friend describes

the green men out of saucer fandom:  thousands gather annually

to parse their fanatical credulousness.  I don't

believe some otherplanet sapience in celadon iguana skin

exists, much less is manifest on Earth (and thus implicitly

contributes its ophidian or photosynthetic consciousness to the layer

of Gaean cerebration-essences that, ever since we branched off

from the long line of progenitor life-forms, circles overhead).

And yet . . . who hasn't, in between our island moments

of rationality, felt . . . a weightedness, a . . . presence, yes,

a presence in the air, that might imply the astonishing visit

of . . . something, yes, of something so beyond the language's ability

to offer us accommodating images, we might as well

say "extragalactic" and buy up the little green keychain.

==

Angels? . . . no.  They fall outside my recognition system

by the width of about a billion UOL's (that's Units of Logic), both

the furrow-visaged wielders of flaming, prohibitive swords and

all those dewy, pastry-bodied winged flitterers so prevalent

on greeting cards.  Soothsayers . . . stigmatics . . . telekinetics . . .

no.  Although what to make of my friend the widow

at 28 who, after a year of ash and lonely grieving, came back

into the world again and met a man at the library, "there

were sparks," and she could sense, could know, her husband was

observing and approved, she could feel his breath

and roused awareness, she could feel his generous nod, and when

one night at as this man undressed her, she could feel

her husband cup her hips to help her thrust her sex up wildly

to meet him.  Who am I to say no?

==

Frankly, if I die first I'd like my wife to mourn

from the roan of her bountiful hair down

to the cellular level every day, and make of this a living testimony

that precludes another man.  She said I'd try

to comply, although I thought I saw some errant sparkle

of withholding in her eye.  In any case, I find her

a comfort.  She was with me on the porch that day

the two cops with the swab kit came to call--because

I fit the age, and the race, and the relevant zip codes,

and I have (as colleague X once said) "an offensively

salty mouth"" which I now gaped for them,

to yield its pink to their investigations.  "Oh--and

will these samples be destroyed?" she asked.  I hadn't thought

to think of saliva in terms of its afterlife.

==

I don't believe in them, though you might

--ghosts.  If so, perhaps you'll know the level

at which a spectral persistence begins.  Does the heart contain

its own lingering phantom-self?  does blood?

does DNA?  If it's a blueprint for the whole of us, then

surely DNA contains a blueprint of our ghost, and it

will be released, at the time of release, with the rest of us

into the energy-can-neither-be-created-nor-destroyedosphere,

into the thoughtverse.  I've fancied if we had the proper nets

to swing around, then we might capture an occasional lavish bee

of sheer cognition as it's homing for the hive.  Or if we had

the proper ears, then we might hear the final singing

as the Wichita police deliver this first of us

and last of us to the flames of incineration.