Beals, Ellen Wade

How to know (Taxonomy)

1. Hard to believe.
2. While the doctor spoke,
3. she scanned her scant knowledge of microbiology:
4. rods and spheres and spirochetes.
5. Flashed to the boss who summed up
6. the world as inhabited by
7. foxes or pigs. Either you were
8. a fox or you were a pig. For a while
9. in the bar after the Christmas party,
10. they categorized all their co-workers
11. and she argued there were also cows and sheep.
12. After they nailed it down
13. to the mailroom clerk, they grew quiet,
14. fox or pig.
15. She feared he might make a pass.
16. Did it all come down to that?
17. Rod, sphere, spirochete.
18. Fox or pig,
19. smoking or non.
20.  
21. A contractor once told her,
22. when it came to door handles,
23. men like knobs, women like latches.
24. Knobs and latches.
25.  
26. On the drive down the boulevard,
27. great grammy says, “I’ve never given such notice
28. to trees before. They’re so green,
29. so lush this year. That one is square.”
30. Perhaps you cannot see the trees
31. for the leaves: oval, palmate,
32. linear, reniform, cuneate, acerose,
33. orbicular, hastate, spatulate.
34.  
35. Columbia River Valley waterfalls
36. are typed: plunge, horsetail,
37. fan, tier, block, cascade,
38. segments, and punchbowl.
39. “Wouldn’t you like to be water?” asks her son,
40. “You could fall and tumble and never get hurt.”
41.  
42. Spatulate and spirochete.
43. Fox and horsetail.
44. Regular or decaf.
45.  
46. You may discriminate the seven types
47. of snowflakes: plates, stars,
48. columns, needles, spatial dendrites, capped
49. columns, irregular crystals.
50. Or perhaps you look at the larger picture
51. and see snow in dunes or sastrugi.
52.  
53. Palmate and plunge
54. Spirochete and dendrite.
55. Plain or peanut.
56.  
57. A favorite poem discusses diamond
58. cuts: pear, heart, oval, emerald,
59. radiant, baguette, trillion, quadrillion
60. marquise, Old European,
61. and American Standard Brilliant.
62.  
63. How to know. What
64. kind, sort, type, class, division?
65. So many different,
66. so much the same.
67. Maybe it comes to this:
68. Two kinds of people,
69. those who divide the world
70. and those who don’t.
71.  
72. Forest or trees.
73. Spatulate or spirochete. Dead or alive.