Geoff Page: ‘Reading up on Carl Linnaeus’

Reading up on Carl Linnaeus

Life is mere taxonomy,
I’m half-inclined to think,
reading up on Carl Linnaeus,

master of the plants.
We need to know where things belong;
a book mis-filed is lost forever.

By twenty-five our frames are set,
those matrices of time and space.
First-night loves are in there somewhere;

first-time trains from first-time airports;
the dawn when your first child was born …
and deaths as well, of course.

It’s true steel drawers will bend a little;
Linnaeus got a few things wrong.
And, plainly, our additions still

outnumber our deletes—or will
until an age of vagueness
slips in, uninvited.

For some, the turning points of history
may wobble by a year;
their sequence though remains in place:

Bach before Beethoven
and then the skip to Brahms.
We mainly know where things are found:

cities, rivers, slow sierras.
Cataloguing is, we’re told,
taxonomy’s first cousin,

those wonderful anomalies
you find when wandering the stacks,
reminding us perhaps of God

who knows where every sparrow falls
but rarely seems to care.
These days, more at ease with doubt,

we dial up Wikipedia
which knows not so much less.
How well its algorithms keep

our lives and worlds together via
those cyberish taxonomies
we would not be without! 

                                                Geoff Page