“Many life forms are so hard to categorize that (scientists) call these organisms
the ‘Problematica.’”—from: Scatter, Adapt and Remember: How Humans Will
Survive a Mass Extinction, by Annalee Newit
Problematica
Here we are, never still, casting lines
upstream like fly fishers toward sources
teeming with what came first
hooking what we can, reeling it in
holding it before our mind’s eye smiling,
snapshotting bizarre Cambrian trophies
placing ourselves at the daisy chain’s end
hoping not to be rolled over or under
by our own cleverness and become extinct
as past Problematica looking
odd and grotesque to future fishers
—as uncategorizable as the dead husks of
Amebelodon whose strange tusks are the only ruts
they’ve left in rutted time
by Jim Culleny