One Cell

...contains a digitally coded database larger, in information content,
than all 30 volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica put together.
--Richard Dawkins, from The Blind Watchmaker

So in our beds or in the beds of lovers,
when we leave we leave volumes
of information, the book of our days
lost to ourselves, sloughed off into the world.
As we wander a filthy city street
we grow new cells, pungent with the old codes,
so we can stop walking, remember
the day we wept openly for a man
in a casket, the night we touched a glass
to our lips and saw all creation
in a stranger's face. The pain of childbirth
comes back, the scent of magnolia, a song
from a commercial, an afternoon carnival,
a choir. Our cells retain it, pinhead
sponges soaking up whatever we need
to keep walking, to keep stumbling into
the blinding darkness ahead.

Dorianne Laux, from Facts About The Moon