'back and fill'
and it doesn't officially mean
how i'm using it
to back off a bit for perspective
and fill in some places you missed
which is so apt
it deserves to be right
so yesterday the science-news sites
reminded me of the biologists'
Tree of Life website/project
which treats the same
dataset
from a much more fragmented perspective
by ignoring
space
and so ignoring
behavior
lifepaths tracing
life's characters
instead using the spatial dimension
to separate species
that are in fact infinitely intermingled
so i want to cultivate a habit
of selectively illuminating
sub-branches on the Tree
whether at the level of
family trees
or species
or whole phyla
you light up an individual's branch
or a cluster of individuals' branches
and propagate the lightbeam
to all their descendants
or the opposite way
to all their direct ancestors
perhaps encompassing the blurred bounds
of the species as a whole
perhaps assigning one color
to a predator species
and another
to each species of its prey
and we might also invert the Tree
to animate the dimensions
of geographical spread
unicellular life
gradually occupying every
oceanic coastline
human life filling africa
then spilling into south asia
and finally discovering
a leaky passage to the americas
no species
colonising both
water and land
so the species-subbranch
leaves vast gaps
in spacetime
the pacific ocean, say
with occasional adventurers
rafting out into nothingness
their branches terminating
alone
