-CONH-
Drunk couple, you join
rail-less roller coaster cars –
elements of water, air
(one plays only for fire, Zeus' bolt)
lie flat, but
your very flatness spins
the gyre, straightens the sheet, crazes
the loop.
Link of bi-polar confusion:
your N end C's donated proton
caught in your C end N, they shed a tear;
now what's between
not single, not double,
but just enough for … life.
plus other team members for their support and encouragement. As well, my friends at the Dublin Street Poets club provided valuable insight, especially with regards to lines 9-11, where the updated version explores the joining of the two AAs releasing a water molecule. The version I workshopped with them included an explanatory footnote I'll reproduce below. One last thing, thanks to the early folder who posted a prose-poem about "nature" back in '08 :-)
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(footnote to the title) This is the planar four atom construction that connects consecutive alpha carbons in a protein. Each one of these nearly identical units of the protein's “backbone” consists of four atoms: carbon(C), oxygen(O), nitrogen(N) and hydrogen(H). Molecular nitrogen in the air is almost inert, so lightning has to disrupt the N2 molecules before the N atoms can be incorporated into organic material. An alpha carbon of an amino acid in a protein (where the sidechains live) attaches to a backbone carbon, which attaches to a backbone nitrogen which attaches to the next alpha carbon. The oxygen goes off from the backbone carbon and the hydrogen goes off from the backbone nitrogen. The carbon-nitrogen bond of the backbone (called the “peptide bond”) gets stiffness through resonance with the double bond to the oxygen, making the whole four atom system a flat approximate rectangle. This means the two alpha carbons are connected by a rather unsymmetrical mess, and helps proteins take on all kinds of different shapes.
What a wonderful treat to find your poem in the morning. Great stuff. Thank you.
phi16