A Glue the Mends Us

I read in Tuesday's NYT that a handful of scientists are looking at insects to learn more about glues to mend us. There is a tube worm that lives its entire life in a tube that it creates from grains of sand. It excretes a glue like substance from the top of its head to secure each grain in place. Another insect creates a firm and flexible egg case from grains of river sand held together with the silk like filaments its body creates.

A glue to mend us must be both strong and flexible, like shoe letter, and cure in water. If discovered, then someday, there may be a pill you can take to stitch together torn fibers of a thigh muscle, holes in the lining of the stomach, detached retinas.

Other tears will prove harder to mend with only the silky filaments of katydid glue like the pull at the throat when words get stuck, the spill of shame into the chest, the hole carved in the back of the heart from loneliness.

The glue that mends these tears is also offered up from the earth waiting for us to discover in the melting of winter ice, a mother's embrace, the bulbs you planted the summer before you died.