Poems are the mostly maladaptive
Consequences of an apparently adaptive
Process that sometimes calls itself cultural
Learning. This is not exactly the case for all
Forms: poems encoding stories in them
Are hardly genomes encoding organisms,
But they are trickier for actual organisms,
Humans, that is, to characterize. Stories,
At the least, are ergonomically selected tales
That coil the learning found in language tightly,
More efficiently, more suitably for the beast.
Stories, it has to be said, have played important
Roles in catapulting their one bipedal ape
Into this planetary outbreak species capable
Of breaking down any preexisting ecosystem
From the top, remaking it to taste, to make
Many, many more bipedal apes. Story sure
Seems adaptive, even when dressed in poetry,
Perhaps especially then. What happened.
Who did what. What happened next. Songs,
However, can also render adaptive mere poems
As forms of emotive expression. But not, not
As is commonly thought, with any frequency
For those who do most of the singing of those
Emotions, else the world were long since overrun
By fine tenors and sopranos, all our schoolyards
Filled with perfect pitch, all adolescents capable
Of fine-tuning the keening, broken heart of the moon.
No, poems are mostly maladaptive, somehow,
Most especially the quiet and thoughtful or, rather,
Shall we confess it, the nonnarrative, alexithymic
Kind that inhabit the inward realm of cognition
Where rules were made for scrutiny, interoception
For cross-examination, and invisibility was only
For the ghostly audience in the surgery, not
For the wind-snapped stob-end on the tall tree
Of life, that tumbled storm-detritus, that patient
Made visible only by falling, the poet in the poem.
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