Something Distinctly Human by Justin Balog

He spoon-fed me
His Genesis
rocking He whispered

I was created in His image
I had dominion over every
creeping thing

I had seen the spill
from waterbeds of arthropods
to a clumsy shuffle of a scaly beast

on a sulfuric beach I had seen
wings grow and later
feathers and fur

claws later hooves stamping
rather stoking a ground
reduced their number of legs

and grew hair for feathers
traded vocal chords repeating
our errors in words

hum glottal hums
together as night set
my many names began

a Virgin Mary Jesus St. George
measured in three parts
wet clay I was spooned together

a lonely morula first
eye ear vestigial tracts
opened to the smell

of dusty myrrh a crusade
marching silently for me in the north
tomorrow da Vinci an idea

of being human
I explored the drawings
of genitals carefully observing

rivers I mechanized
a hydraulic pump
to syphon upward the word

human a tangible piece of river scum
the cell the mass the lichen the breath
or a Darwin

I measured tortoises
in centimeters finches sang
in different tunes as night set

in scrub brush or on ground
yet to be specified
I scribbled a memoir

in DNA metaphorically
structured as a human
mosaic group of tourists

snapping polaroid pictures
at Basilica Santa Maria’s
Creation of the World

in 1971 shaking air
setting color to light
keepsakes from a trip

that common memoir
substituted I for we and
somewhere in the text

a story I began with a God
ended with the fact of us
all the dying stars lonely

send their million-year-old
light that ends at the fact
of topsoil chlorophyll

setting color to light
the sugar the exercise the breath
the vibrancy the apparentness the facts

that I am alone but I am
a finch’s song synonymous
with gospel drawings of a pump

explained as a fact of centrifugal
force this mass of cells
through renaissance and science

one unified microscopic breath
hoping for something divine
explained as distinctly human

Read on . . .