Intron Moment
When I get off the phone with my wife I think
Of DNA, the great lengths that don’t matter,
That even its magniloquent scholars call “junk,”
So much that if you listened to the language
Of life you’d hear the ums between words, confabulation,
What we say when we’ve nothing to say,
As when she calls at lunch and asks How are things?
And I claim, Fine, as I would with the building
In flames. We ping pong pleasantries for five minutes
Then I return to putting out the day’s fires
Only now pondering lives we spend mostly
Apart just to make enough to have a life,
Something like divorce with marriage spliced in
Mornings and nights. I.e. she’s a stranger
And how do I know she’s not disbursing government
Secrets in coded want ads, begging exegesis
From her cult’s high priest, or running a house
Of ill repute by the shipyard? Mingling
Our loose strands, we become a stranger strangeness
Though scientists have begun to guess
At the hidden purpose in those stretches
Of fallow chromosome they also call introns,
A refreshingly arcane and important name
I attach to this break I take from a day
That started as the pieces we call hours
And put together by staying whole. The part
Where the phone rings isn’t the story’s moral,
Just abiding distraction, as if Sisyphus let go
Of the stone whose rolling went unnoticed
As he flipped open his cell and told his wife
What would bore anyone else, scientists
For instance studying mating rituals in fruit flies,
Or G-men eavesdropping through a wall.
But such twaddle sufficiently scrutinized turns out
To be a cipher for life, itself the redundant
Though universal meaning, as if at the most
Intimate level, nothing is everything.
—David Moolten
