Valency

I say a single word.

Speaking connects
Me to you,
The word, to us.

Language or chemistry throws lines
Between everything,
Tangled, unpredictable lines,
Spun yarn on heavy air.

Cellular, chemical, atomic, alchemical.
Circles of electricity surround us
Draw us in, together, nuclei
Bonded, incomplete without each other
And the tenuous energy we share.

Electron-spin, as analogous
As the words we use,
The approximations of speech
Echoing in the subatomic regions
Where our blood is built.

How many atoms do we make?
How many huddled individuals?

It is written, it is said,
Or recorded in every fold of skin,
In laughter lines, crow’s feet,
Tired flesh on weary bones,
How every sinewy vein or corpuscle
Every tiny molecule of being
Tumbles and touches
Every other.

We are known by our flesh,
By our bodies and the heaving breath
Labouring there
Or the mysterious organisms we became,
Edifices of some evolution,
Where past lives slough with the scurf of living.

Coagulation made us human
In the assemblies of the body
In gatherings and conjunctions
Hands or minds meeting
In unarranged contact.

Human on the face of it.
Stumbling crowds,
The heart and expression
Of our species’ history.

In the smallest recesses
In the complex murmuring of our pulses
The rhythm and beat reiterate change
From times even our cells forget.

In the colliding particles of the atom.
In the vague orbiting electrons
And the charging and repulsing energies within
What aggregates and builds each one
Aggregates and builds them all.

The capacity to combine defines us,
Overwhelms the struggle
Life has with itself
Constructs everything from spinning atoms.

Ineffable to insignificant,
It goes on building.

And what we choose means nothing.

Initialising