A big chunk of this poem was from a new work workshop poem which eventually become “The Bull Sea Lion.” This entire first section about flying and gravity and such fell away from that pieced as it was written and rewritten. But this morning I read a piece in National Geographic about the discovery of fossils showing how whales evolved from land mammals to ocean mammals, and remembered what I’d written and went looking for it. The title definitely came from reading that piece!

Evolution

Flying, only a matter of matter
free from the weight of predisposition

A dream        I am the ancestor common to
condor and whale, astounding

bulk astoundingly agile, soaring at will
through water and air

Flying—our nature, one and all,
before we thought to fall

Gravity was less, then, levity
the law before any creature

evolved a brain that thought to warn
look before you leap