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Two marriages:

            Clara and Fritz Haber: Clara finishes a doctorate in chemistry. She is the only woman at her school. She is brilliant but reserved. The first time Fritz proposes, she declines. The second time, she agrees. After they marry, he demands that Clara be a housewife and a mother, while he travels for work. When war breaks out in 1918, he proves his patriotism through the development of a new weapon, something invisible to the human eye and absolutely silent. After finding out about the chlorine gas, Clara shoots herself in the family garden.

            Marie and Pierre Curie: Pierre makes several marriage proposals to Marie before she accepts. A commonality then between these women. On her wedding day, she wears a dark blue dress. More practical, she thinks, and afterward, in her dress, goes back to the laboratory with Pierre. The lab is the basement of their home. In three years, they discover polonium and radium. In eight, they are awarded a Nobel. At first the committee will not recognize her (no woman has won before) but Pierre demands it—she is the one who sifted through ten tons of mineral-rich ore to find that tenth of a gram.

Several times a day Granny Lin bathes Old Tang: in the morning and before bedtime, and whenever he wets or dirties himself. The private bathroom is what Granny Lin likes best about her marriage. For all her life, she has used public bathrooms, fighting with other slippery bodies for the lukewarm water drizzling from the rusty showers. Now that she has a bathroom all to herself, she never misses any chance to use it.

There are the trash eaters: there are the diamond eaters. The diamond eaters are biblical; the trash eaters only so much in that they are lepers. I am on the side of the trash eaters, though I have eaten so many diamonds they are now poking through my skin. Everyone tries to figure out how to overcome the embarrassment of existing.

My mother had good hair, a term she would never use herself because, she said, it was so hurtful she couldn’t possibly believe it. But my mother’s hair was undeniably long and thick, a mass of loose curls that Callie and I did not inherit and that she was determined to cut off before we began our new life.

She tried to talk both of us into joining her, but only Callie took the bait. My mother got her with the promise of hair made so easy and simple, you could run your fingers through it. When it was all over, Callie was left with an outgrowth of stiff, sodden curls that clung in limp clusters to her forehead and the nape of her neck and made the back of her head smell like burning and sugar.

The pond is like a mackerel skin tonight,

the mackerel like a beaded evening bag.

This is like that, that is like this, oh,

let's call the whole thing off and take it straight:

nothing is like anything else.

Even the parrot and the apish ape

mirror, mimic and do like — unmatched.

To begin:  algae, abalone, alewife —

each the spitting image of itself.

Likewise beetles (potato, scarab and whirligig.)

Nothing even comes close to barrel cactus,

nothing is more original than a bog,

more rare than the cougar and crane —

save all the above named.

I've never seen anything like it — dustbowls,

deer, the descent of man and estuaries,

flakes of snow (no two like) fire,

flax, gannets and gulls.

Honeybees and the Hoover Dam

are unique -- there is nothing like a dam.

Ditto inbreeding, ice ages, industrialization,

joshua trees, lagoons and the law

that to liken a lichen is tautological.

Indeed, the rule of diminishing simile holds

that all of these are idiosyncracies:

the Leakeys, legumes, maize, marsupials and moose.

Virtually nothing is extraneous here —

not orchids, ooze, pampas nor peat.

This is the world of plenitude and power —

every bit of it out of this world:

the rain and rattlers, sperm, swamps and swans.

As now we inch toward an end — vectors

and a winter that figures to be like no other,

say the selfsame earth is to your liking,

and let us continue — yeast, yuccas, zoons,

all things like, beyond compare.

I found a white stone on the beach

inlaid with a blue-green road I could not follow.

All night I’d slept in fits and starts,

my only memory the in-out, in-out, of the tide.

And then morning. And then a walk,

the white stone beckoning, glinting in the sun.

I felt its calm power as I held it

and wished a wish I cannot tell.

It fit in my hand like a hand gently

holding my hand through a sleepless night.

A stone so like, so unlike,

all the others it could only be mine.

The worldess white stone of my life!