Grammar School: Evolution

Not even our teachers believed in it, though they tried
to convince us otherwise, directing with rigid cheerfulness

our attention to illustrations long outdated: solemn menageries
of beak and bone, man in his elementary stages. All of this

was a test, we knew, to be passed only if we declined
to look too closely at specimens preserved by the disregard

of our siblings before us. To endure, we had only to close
our textbooks the moment it was allowed, the swish

of their pages like a serpent in Adam's garden—
something we might wish to take hold of, but mustn't.