I sit and file
I sit and file my nails
too brittle now at 82 to cut with scissors
and think of what they’re made of.
It looks like cheap plastic,
the sort called ‘celluloid’
but it’s really made of protein,
a combination of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen,
and nitrogen
and perhaps some others that I don’t know about.
It’s one of those fantastic possibilities
of carbon life.
That wonder element, formed in stars,
blown into space, condensed in rocks
to surface on new planets
joins up in so many promiscuous ways
to mingle with others to make life.
Well, living things, with cells in which
proteins mix to make a million compounds
that grow limbs and brains and guts
and all that’s us and all the rest
that we eat and that eat us.
Will I file my toenails now?
