2001-01-06 - 12:16 a.m.

An entry for The Ampersand Project.

Topic: the double helix.

the salt of deoxyribose nucleic acid: a found poem by Peggy Lin Duthie

I felt marvelously alive when I awoke,
full of sleek umbrellas.
But then no person was on hand.

In horror at the prospect
of being long
without fashionably dressed people,
my expectations were dashed
as soon as I arrived

to spot a group of healthy hockey players
and several pallid debutantes.
They were not for me.
I would not be invited back
if I
too old to be unusual
acted like everybody else.
It was thus difficult
to avoid the disquieting thought
that I was not accomplishing anything.

I would discover
the unsatisfactory nature
of outdoor games.

Thinking about the form
of the letters
that I could soon write,
I found him lying flat on his stomach,
hiding his face
from the dim light I had turned on.
No new fireworks went off,
but now,
he could assure me
the more dispassionately
he considered his life,
the more he knew
he had been wise
to follow his own hunches.

The following
strangely noiseless
morning,
I sat at the top of my desk.
There was no way to avoid intellectual games.
There seemed no point.
If I had been brought up on English beer
I would not be in my sorry state.
I had never heard him shooting off his mouth
on subjects about which he knew nothing.

I understood that if we could all agree
everything would be solved
and we would have no recourse
but to be engineers or doctors.

This nonsense
was only annoying and not fatal.

Even though I panic at voids
this did not seem to be the time
to be a coward.

------------------------------------------------

Collaged from James D. Watson's The Double Helix.