While your fingertips graze the engravings
of your doctorate degree,
and while you tell me that I'm not seeing
what I really ought to see –
a list of values so precise
of little value to me –
my lens is set on 40x
and my vision takes careful steps –
retrograde, delicately –
balancing on microtubules,
the same ones you dryly dissect.
Dodging vesicles, then, I row,
through a huge ionic lake;
at each turn I make by lipid shores
I see something sweet metabolize
for critical – beautiful – energy.
Ripples of reticula approach
and lead me to the envelope
which contains the message
that you've never quite transcribed properly
but stained time and time again –
methylene blue, acridine orange –
but not even once with your wondercolor.
