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Evolution


Music came first, an unbroken pure tone

passing over the smooth surface of clay, how long

no way to count, until ripples

ridged the clay, and the music found them

and began to rise and fall, billions and billions

of times (call them years), until buds

extended, became digits, pushing

up from the clay, wriggling,

swaying side to side, all moving together,

a metronome, marking the rising

and falling tones, billions upon billions,

highs growing infinitesimally

further from lows. Then four

fingers, as they had become, held back

behind the tone, waved response

to another four, neither a hand yet.


The waving fingers began to break

ranks, waggle to each other. New patterns

made for shifting air currents; the tones changed,

more rapidly now, a million years, now half

a million, more, less, with rapid

irregularity, and the second group

of fingers began to tap the clay

they had sprung from. The tones absorbed the taps

for a while, then moved with them,

propelled by them, pushed this way and that,

and rhythms came into the void,

four fingers tapping, four dancing,

contrapuntal, infinite variety

which needs nothing more than itself, and could have

gone on forever, but that the fingers

pushed further out of the clay, a new nub appeared,

became a thumb, and pushed against the fingers

sounding a snap in air: a beat.


The dancing fingers loved

the beat; they moved with it,

around it, against it. Mostly,

it propelled them, they stretched upward,

pushing through clay, they became hands,

then wrists, then arms that jointed, and would have

jointed again, but that shoulders

grew out and stopped them. But the beat

went on, and the hands were drawn

back to the clay, the music pulsed

around them, the notes were blue,

the rhythms syncopated, and this

was happening all over now, shoulders,

arms, hands from the clay,

back to it, and the clay growing soft

and malleable where the hands

and the music touched it. The hands

began modeling, some pulling it up,

and up, some making finger-width grooves, fingers

probing inside the grooves, until the music

and the hands and the new shapes

made the clay moist and fecund, and

algae grew, and sporangia.




Tad Richards

levelheaded: Evolution


At its simplest, this poem weaves together two separate processes: the evolution of music and the development of a human arm.


The first line of the poem tells us, “Music came first.” From this beginning, the word “music” and a description of music as “an unbroken pure tone” present music as fully developed concept. For the speaker, music’s existence is not reliant upon human ability to create it; it precedes us. Then “[n]ew patterns” develop. The same music that exists while we’re just a “smooth surface of clay” is supplemented by “four fingers tapping, four dancing, / contrapuntal.” The very clay from which we are created can be molded, “growing soft / and malleable where the hands / and the music touched it.” Music may come first, but by the end of the poem, by the time the poem’s increasing complexity leads to “algae” and “sporangia,” music and the creative clay hands have become interdependent.  The “beat” from the end of the second stanza can only be heard after “a new nub appeared, / became a thumb, and pushed against the fingers.” The new “grooves” at the end of the poem are, unsurprisingly, “finger-width.” The big picture here is that music (and all art, really) is inseparable from human physiology. Even if “an unbroken pure tone” existed before humans, it developed alongside us into true music.


All this is handled quite deftly. There are some nice touches, like the rhythm and rhyme of “But the beat / went on, and the hands were drawn” in which the language simulates the actual beat while playing on the word “drawn.”  The phrase, “The tones absorbed the taps,” similarly uses the sounds of “tone” and “tap” to enact the absorption.  But there is also something else going on in the poem, something harder to pinpoint.


The evolution of music and the development of a limb would seem most at home in a history paper or a scientific dissertation. Instead, we have them tied together in a poem. There is something mysterious about the way music just is. There is something magical, even religious, in the animation of the clay. And there is something confoundedly figurative about all this mysticism, as if “music” and “clay” are meant as stand-ins for any number of interdependent concepts. If we gathered all the science and history ever written, there would still be some big holes in our understanding of what it’s like to see the world as a human, and to be sure, there are big holes even when we throw poetry into the mix, but this poem’s attempt to build upon these ideas with deeply expressive language and emotion seems, to us, worth the effort.



-The Editors