Worms

It may be doubted whether there is any other animal which has played so important a part in the history of the world, as have these lowly, organized beings.
—Charles Darwin

Little tillers. Ploughs of night-
writhe and gizzard. Eyeless, they grind
through humus—through leaf tip, rock
bit, rootlet—burrowing tubal
as the tubes they burrow. Dirt-
serpents, vermicelli, bait. Hook-
clowns, inchlings, doll snakes. Sectioned,
intestinal—each a squiggle
of innard—a stretch of entrail
or colon. Intelligent, unsung

creatures, Darwin noted, humble men
born blind and dumb. He kept some
in the cellar, let a few loose
in the drawing room, where he used
his son’s bassoon to test their sense
of sound. (Low flats, blown long, made them twine
with squirm.) Outside, he tossed cinders
on lime, charred marl on ashes, watched
as earth swallowed earth by way of worm-
work. As all was churned, pulled down. Stone-
henge rose from snow like stacked bones
that winter, when Darwin knelt—
in his final year—in its circle’s center.
When he bent his beard over a slab
of fallen sarsen, sunken under worm
cast and loam that had frozen.
To know them before going below
to join them. Their ganglions and five hearts.
Their slow, slow force—aerating,
burying—alive with decay.