Ovid called
his collection of observations
Metamorphoses because
he really saw these changes
happening around him,
people becoming
birds and trees.
Daily slippage
of the unset human genome
was turning persons
into other living things
as previously inactive
parts of chromosomes
were being switched on.
Ovid wrote this up
as the work of the gods,
foreshadowing a later theory
that held
language emerged
from the right side of the brain
and talked to Wernicke’s area
on the left--
a non-integrated consciousness
chattering away
inside the Greek mind
in voices
the hearer couldn’t place,
and so ascribed, as Ovid did,
to the gods.
We know now
it was a bicameral legislature
at war with itself,
unable to pass laws
that would slow or stop
the co-opting of the citizenry
into unexpected forms
from the plant and animal
kingdoms.
Being human,
the people came
to accept transformation
for its own sake--
of themselves, first--
but transformation
is its own advocate,
quietly slopping over
the sides of the bucket
onto everything.
his collection of observations
Metamorphoses because
he really saw these changes
happening around him,
people becoming
birds and trees.
Daily slippage
of the unset human genome
was turning persons
into other living things
as previously inactive
parts of chromosomes
were being switched on.
Ovid wrote this up
as the work of the gods,
foreshadowing a later theory
that held
language emerged
from the right side of the brain
and talked to Wernicke’s area
on the left--
a non-integrated consciousness
chattering away
inside the Greek mind
in voices
the hearer couldn’t place,
and so ascribed, as Ovid did,
to the gods.
We know now
it was a bicameral legislature
at war with itself,
unable to pass laws
that would slow or stop
the co-opting of the citizenry
into unexpected forms
from the plant and animal
kingdoms.
Being human,
the people came
to accept transformation
for its own sake--
of themselves, first--
but transformation
is its own advocate,
quietly slopping over
the sides of the bucket
onto everything.
Harrison Fisher served a term as Writer-in-Residence with the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts. He published twelve collections of poems from 1977 to 2000, four of them book-length: Blank Like Me, Curtains for You, UHFO, and Poematics of the Hyperbloody Real. After a 20+-year hiatus from writing and publishing poems over the beginning of the 21st century, Fisher returned in 2022 with new work in magazines. In 2024, his poems have appeared in BlazeVOX, Book XI, MIDLVLMAG, Misfitmagazine, Rundelania, and Transom.
