Sex and death

I discovered yesterday, to my delight and chagrin, that I like the Ken Ken puzzles that appear next to the crossword puzzle in the New York Times: in a Ken Ken puzzle, you have a four or six frame grid which, when filled in, have the numbers 1-4, or 1-6 in each horizontal and vertical row;  the grid itself is broken up into smaller sections, and in each section you are to enter the number that will yield a given number after performing the indicated mathematical function - adding, subtracting, dividing, or multiplying.  Thus if you have a three panel section on a six frame grid that carries the notation "20x" it means that the section should be filled out with the numbers 1, 4, and 5 but that to figure out where to put them, you have to see how the numbers work in the horizontal and vertical arrays. 

Get it?  If not, no worries;  you will not have to stress out about the hours that will be sucked up by this particular past time, though I'm told that such logic games stave off dementia in the long haul.  This is just a way of introducing the fact that rather than pick up today's paper with a whole fresh set of puzzles that would delete an hour or so from other productive forms of activity, I contented myself with reading yesterday's news, which in the Times includes the weekly science section.  Nicholas Wade's article on genetic variation (and the lack thereof) in grapes contains the great lines: "The purpose of sex, though this is perhaps not widely appreciated, is recombination,...the new combinations  of genes provide variation for evolution to work on, and in particular they let slow-growing things like plants and animals keep one step ahead of the microbes that prey upon them." 

While one might argue that we should in fact be seeing microbes as co-conspirators in the ongoing acts of creation, this kind of insight is well worth the two bucks that a New York Times will set you back if you pick it up in your local Acme in suburban Philadelphia, but the article that is staying with me is one by Ben Daitz, a doctor reporting on the ways in which health care workers affiliated with the Fort Defiance Indian Hospital open up conversations with Navajo families about end-of-life directives, a tricky negotiation in a cultural context in which it is understood that to speak of death is to invite it. 

The staff ended up composing a poem:

"When that time comes, when my last breath leaves me, I choose to die in peace to meet Shi-dy-in."

Here, I'm thinking of the wisdom of these folks in understanding that some things have to be approached in lyric time;  keeping this in mind in the wake of a year in which I was repeatedly reminded of all the different ways in which our expected narratives of our lives get interrupted and transformed and thinking of the poets -- Lucille Clifton, John Rybicki, Joy Harjo, Barbara Ras -- who helped to show the way through.