In My Daughter's 7th Grade Science Lab
A word is elegy to what it signifies
Robert Hass
You teach me eye and arm, your hand cradling
The weighted base of this microscope.
A careful, slow turning of power, this,
And at your touch a miniscule slice of frog
Muscle transforms into clear facets
Of rubies, I say, the new world already
Naming itself into the bearable.
Do you see? you ask me, catching now
A nail scraping of onion between wedded
Glass, my terrible nightly weepings
Dissipating into thin paper
As I squint one-eyed down the eye tube
Into light, nudge the first apparent nothings
Into the torn edges of onion, now
The illuminated epidermis--
Those soldierly cells with their black dots, eyes,
I think, of this translated nuclei
Littering the dear and visible world
With our dreams of sphere and stem, word and tear.