Problematica

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“Many life forms are so hard to categorize that (scientists) call these organisms the ‘Problematica.'” —from: Scatter, Adapt and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction, by Annalee Newitz
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Here we are, never still, casting lines
upstream like fly fishers toward sources
teeming with what came first
hooking what we can, reeling it in
holding it before our minds eye smiling,
snapshotting bizarre Cambrian trophies
placing ourselves at the daisy chain’s end
hoping not to be rolled over or under
by our own cleverness, extinct as past
Problematica looking odd and grotesque
to future fishers —as uncategorizable
as the dead husks of Amebelodon
whose strange tusks are the only ruts
they’ve left in rutted time
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by Jim Culleny, 9/4/13