Poems by David Han
Illustrations by Rand Burnette
The following three poems are exerpts from a poetry collection exploring how forms of information, from genetic material to literature, can change over time. As part of this project, Han translated the first poem, “Nuclear Repository”, into an amino acid sequence following the IUPAC system, then into a corresponding DNA sequence, which was finally inserted into a plasmid map. This plasmid could be replicated for years if introduced into a bacteria colony.
Nuclear Repository
How many of us trail away in the tail of the century’s comet Pared down through successive and minor apocalypse While everything carries on unconcerned, Like a serial, unconstrained by the passage of time. All this builds a low ache that worries away the satisfaction Of designing a time capsule encoded in the frail length of nucleotides. Memories of now like pollen stirred up from grass underfoot And reading about them the hayfever. It’s better, then, to saturate cells with looped caution Like the Sandia report said: This place is not a place of honor. The letters meant to be decoded after interpretation Has been made moot by force, Their reading a strange iftar following a lengthy fast from recording these things. This poem is a transposon, not a text, Which can be left to convalesce in a glass dish, or in the dirt, Until it’s something else, how wonderful that Not only meaning, but words themselves become Emergent structures of time and separation, As bases melt away and are themselves replaced. Time capsules and half-lives quote themselves into redundancy, but the I Ching is already the state of nature, not red or Hobbesian And so from this typeset anlagen knotted into a loop In a tiny bacterial tefillin that glows when read, New and more eloquent words write themselves out over the centuries.
Chimeras
Stop tapping on the glass so much, it rings The aquarium senseless, recombinant frogs and all, Oscillating about the awkward fifth leg, glowing red With a stolen jellyfish light, kicking welterweight with bantam limbs Or shake the plates of Escherichia, made full Of plasmids by electric pulse or lipofection, churning out Packets of antibiotics and chyme for storage in little membranes, Factory lines set by emetic rhythms and fresh agar. There’s a strange scansion to rows of corn seedlings taking root Changing meter with every mutant line, caesuras where inbreeding proved too much All in service of productivity, sun to ethanol, vented into melted northern lights When demand fails to reach supply. Everything is just so brutally fungible, commodities exchanged freely after short sproutings between damp sheaves of green lichen Tightly bound muslin mycelia sponging up surplus value, inside A rotten log a textile mill.
The Poem Handed Down in the Long Term
A breakthrough, the genome sequenced, Short phrases make sense in isolation, excited linguists Looking for clues in the past, pick out promising nonsense: “What is knocking at the gate? And who can say? The answer, a head turned, a walk down the garden path Towards a specific end.” All at once though, reading it leads to nothing really decisive, thoughts slow to a birdlike two-step Picking out trivia line by line, Thinking, “threnody is such a nice sounding word” Suggests ophanim resonating, brasslike ringing, a certain forgetfulness follows “Slow cranking of a lethe” The substitution unbeknownst rendered from lathe. Makes sense, considering where this ended up from; Cell to cell samizdat passed under ruinous light’s scrutiny Feldspar glint along cleaved shearing, purpling under gram stain That supplies the petrichor of it; stacked up and mineralized underground, Evident only as scent long down the line when bright blue air floods over the record of past rain. Which is to say such a poem is not waxen, lying in state Between pine sheets, in vellum panes, under glass. No, Meaning is set adrift like a paper boat, coincidences Stack, change by change in current And it becomes something else entirely, not a raft as before For ideas, a hope of posterity imagine the Alexandrian Library pressed under a slide, or cultured in cheese and beer But the repurposed material still suggests some initial form, as a skeleton might. Perhaps someone will reverse-transcribe all history from the missense mutations there, Creation back from Croatoan, great insight from palimpsest.
Lyceum 