wonderful life

as alien as anything on Earth
a moray has no fingers or thumbs but
to feed its length (if not so much its girth)
laryngeal jaws drag prey down to its gut
and hagfish get along without a jaw
content to wrench a living from the dead
a slimy sort of motile deep-sea craw
but teeth distinguish one end as the head
a further branch displays cephalopods
whose retinas make ours look crude and blind
edentate image of their limber gods
endowed--if not with joints--with a fine mind
Charles Darwin sketched our wondrous fam'ly tree
my cousins don't look anything like me