Mechanism

Honor a going thing, goldfinch, corporation, tree,
  morality: any working order,
  animate or inanimate: it
 
has managed directed balance,
  the incoming and outgoing energies are working right,
  some energy left to the mechanism,
 
some ash, enough energy held
  to maintain the order in repair,
  assure further consumption of entropy,
 
expending energy to strengthen order:
  honor the persisting reactor,
  the container of change, the moderator: the yellow
 
bird flashes black wing-bars
  in the new-leaving wild cherry bushes by the bay,
  startles the hawk with beauty,
 
flitting to a branch where
  flash vanishes into stillness,
  hawk addled by the sudden loss of sight:
 
honor the chemistries, platelets, hemoglobin kinetics,
  the light-sensitive iris, the enzymic intricacies
  of control,
 
the gastric transformations, seed
  dissolved to acrid liquors, synthesized into
  chirp, vitreous humor, knowledge,
 
blood compulsion, instinct: honor the
  unique genes,
  molecules that reproduce themselves, divide into
 
sets, the nucleic grain transmitted
  in slow change through ages of rising and falling form,
  some cells set aside for the special work, mind
 
or perception rising into orders of courtship,
  territorial rights, mind rising
  from the physical chemistries
 
to guarantee that genes will be exchanged, male
  and female met, the satisfactions cloaking a deeper
  racial satisfaction:
 
heat kept by a feathered skin:
  the living alembic, body heat maintained (bunsen
  burner under the flask)
 
so the chemistries can proceed, reaction rates
  interdependent, self-adjusting, with optimum
  efficiency—the vessel firm, the flame
 
staying: isolated, contained reactions! the precise and
  necessary worked out of random, reproducible,
  the handiwork redeemed from chance, while the
 
goldfinch, unconscious of the billion operations
  that stay its form, flashes, chirping (not a
  great songster) in the bay cherry bushes wild of leaf. ?