Life Force

Oct 19 2018

My gutters are filled with leaves

the downspouts plugged.

Accreting

like sedimentary layers

each unattended fall.

Where they steadily rot

in a swill of stagnant water,

bitter tannins

bleeding out

their stubborn brownish rust.

Long enough

and this brew will turn to soil.

An aerial refuge

of exotic life

in a sagging metal trough,

self-contained

and unexplored;

green sprouts, unfurling in spring

fruiting fungi in fall.

Irrepressible life,

pressing itself

into the tiniest niche.

Perhaps, in the decomposing heat

a spore has arisen, some bacterium evolved;

a molecule, awaiting its discoverer

that will heal

relieve

render us immortal.

Irrepressible life, always finding a way.

Except for today

when the hired man scooped out the crud

and hosed down the gutters.

Like a primordial planet of cooling rock, sterile and steaming

my troughs have been scoured;

so life has no purchase

and time goes unmeasured,

no succession or death

to count it against.

For the sake of order

what has been lost?

The complexity

we are ill-equipped to see,

orders of magnitude

infinitesimally small.

Like the microscopic life

that somehow survives

in earth's black and airless rock,

all the way down, layer by layer

beneath its crushing weight.

I am amazed at this persistence.

The life force

of this blue and green planet.

The rich diversity

beneath the barren surface

we too often fail to see

or even imagine.

I've been looking for someone to clean out my gutters. They've been dripping for years, I reluctantly admit. I can almost imagine the concrete underneath, steadily wearing away into a smooth shallow pool: like the drip-drip-drip of Chinese water torture, speeding up geological time. So looking up at the sagging gutters, I am feeling increasingly negligent for having ignored them for well over a decade. And recall, when I last got up on the roof, scooping out this heavy black muck: decomposing leaves, composting soil, and who knows what dead animals!

This brought to mind a recent article I read, about forms of anaerobic life found in rock deep in the earth's mantle: life that doesn't get its energy from the sun, but from chemical reactions in wet microscopic seams and fissures; and life that metabolizes and reproduces so slowly it might seem to live almost forever. Scientists who study exobiology think this may be a good model for whatever alien life may eventually be found on other planets. (Here's the link: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/10/meet-endoterrestrials/571939/ .)

In both cases, there is this powerful impression of the indomitability of life. And how, when we are only tuned to what is familiar, we can be blind to it. Life everywhere, hiding in plain sight. Life that will persist – somewhere in some form – even after we have finished trashing the planet, as we are so rapidly and irresponsibly doing.