Leak

The channel that keeps a nerve from firing at nothing has two of its four parts grown into one, and nobody could say where it came from. Not from bacteria, where the other kinds begin.

This week in Darmstadt they found one in a virus that gets into algae out at sea. Not stolen from the alga. Its own.

So the small leak of potassium that holds me level while you tell me the news, that keeps my hand quiet on the cup, may have been, at first, something a sickness carried from one green cell to the next

and left behind, the way you leave a coat at a house you don't go back to, and someone, a long time after, finds it fits.