Mechanism

Honor a going thing, goldfinch, corporation, tree, morality: any working order, animate or inanimate: it has managed directed balance, the incoming and outgoing energies are working right, some energy left to the mechanism, some ash, enough energy held to maintain the order in repair, assure further consumption of entropy, expending energy to strengthen order: honor the persisting reactor, the container of change, the moderator: the yellow bird flashes black wing-bars in the new-leaving wild cherry bushes by the bay, startles the hawk with beauty, flitting to a branch where flash vanishes into stillness, hawk addled by the sudden loss of sight: honor the chemistries, platelets, hemoglobin kinetics, the light-sensitive iris, the enzymic intricacies of control, the gastric transformations, seed dissolved to acrid liquors, synthesized into chirp, vitreous humor, knowledge, blood compulsion, instinct: honor the unique genes, molecules that reproduce themselves, divide into sets, the nucleic grain transmitted in slow change through ages of rising and falling form, some cells set aside for the special work, mind or perception rising into orders of courtship, territorial rights, mind rising from the physical chemistries to guarantee that genes will be exchanged, male and female met, the satisfactions cloaking a deeper racial satisfaction: heat kept by a feathered skin: the living alembic, body heat maintained (bunsen burner under the flask) so the chemistries can proceed, reaction rates interdependent, self-adjusting, with optimum efficiency—the vessel firm, the flame staying: isolated, contained reactions! the precise and necessary worked out of random, reproducible, the handiwork redeemed from chance, while the goldfinch, unconscious of the billion operations that stay its form, flashes, chirping (not a great songster) in the bay cherry bushes wild of leaf.