Tag Archives: science

MATTER: A Pantoum

MATTER: A Pantoum

What gods do is make and let the pieces fall.

Billions of clocks on billions of beaches

turning as our hands move however they

move or our four legs or six or eight.

 

Billions of eyes in billions of deserts

move through their times or none and 

we move our two legs or four or six or eight and

our hearts and chloroplasts, mycelium,

 

our many eyes or none.

Our structures crystalize, the plates

and hearts and chloroplasts and mycelium

subduct and bump as we rise and fall.

 

The structure of our crystals, how the plates 

and all we do is an echo of clapping hands as we

subduct and bump and rise and fall.

With voices, silences, wavings of branches

 

we echo with our hands 

and twigs and whatever anemones use

for voices: silences? wavings of branches?

We’re all made of one matter.

 

Twigs and anemones

turn while our hands move however they

move because we’re all the matter

and making matter and falling is what we do.

BACK TO THE EDGES OF ODDNESS

BACK TO THE EDGES OF ODDNESS

 

Since midsummer, fairies with green wings 

twinkle around my eyes all night long. 

They beg me to be invisible, 

offer me fernseed and a cap woven 

of milkweed and thistle fluff. 

The dog is restless when they are in the house, 

and my husband can’t sleep, 

and I can’t explain. The cats 

don’t seem to mind.

 

Whatever shall we do with realism, 

reason, logic, the sciences that deny 

the way things are? A cloud of demons, 

their sharp laughter, the steadfast angels 

raising their lavender shields. 

Every tree has a soul;  early in the morning

you can hear them singing to the sun. 

Their music wakes the birds. 

Angels are stars, balls of flaming gas. 

Everything is real, but more or less 

than anyone can imagine. 

God is everything. 

Nothing is mutually exclusive.

TOTAL EECLIPSE OF THE SUN

Last year at this time, we were heading South. I wrote this description of the event when we returned.

 

A TOTAL EECLIPSE OF THE SUN

 

We drove to Virginia and picked up John’s sister, then drove on to North Carolina and put up in a hotel about three hours from totality, planning to get up early and drive south if the weather looked good. In the morning, reports indicated very little chance of clear skies in South Carolina, and perfectly clear skies where we were, so we opted for 100% chance of 96%.  With the blessing of the hotel clerk, John set up a sun-filtered scope in the courtyard of the inn, and we made our headquarters in the long hallway just inside. Staff people, who had seen John setting up, asked us if we were there for the “ee’-clipse.”  (We decided that we much prefer the southern pronunciation.) We said we were, and invited them to come back at 1:15, if they could, for a look.  And they came. We shared our ee-clipse glasses and John kept the scope aligned, and for the next hour people came and went and came back again to follow the progression of the moon across the sun. The manager stopped by and offered us coffee and told us that he’d studied astronomy in college. A few guests came out—one a remarkable woman whose blonde hair was piled on top of her head and decorated with plastic fruit. Two people told us that the last time there was an ee-clipse was when Jesus was crucified. We said, “Well, that’s interesting.” A young black chef who had joined us several times asked if it was okay if his mama, who had come to pick him up,  looked. “Of course,” we told him, and she joined us. She and I got to chatting after she had looked through the glasses and the scope. I found out that she was from Queens and had a sister in Poughkeepsie, near where our son and his family live. At the peak of the event, she and I agreed that the shadows were different; that the bright sunlight had changed. We were both wearing beige shirts and white caps. Her son stepped back from the scope and nudged me, then turned his head and said, “Sorry. I thought you were my mama.”  And I, a white woman from the country’s whitest state, without thinking, said the perfect thing:  “That’s okay. All of us mamas look alike.” He looked surprised for a minute, and then laughed, and nudged me again. One tall, elegant woman with silver hair stopped to look every time she passed through the hallway carrying a stack of linen, and every time, she jumped up and down and clapped her hands. Another woman, who had promised her husband that she would not look, even with eeclipse glasses, watched her and said, “I’ll just enjoy her happiness.”  After the moon started sliding away, people began thanking us and drifting away. John was packing the car, and I was in the hall, clearing the last of our things from the table, when the tall woman stopped by once more. “Thank you, honey,” she said. “Oh,” I said, “It was so much fun to share this with all of you.” And then she threw her arms around me and kissed my cheek. “I can’t wait to tell my grandkids about this,” she said. “I can’t wait to tell mine,” I said. Better than totality.

THE SHELL OF BELIEFS

from a prompt

THE SHELL OF BELIEFS

 

The chambered nautilus expands,

seals off each outgrown space,

and yet the empty rooms remain

as spiraled witness to the change.

 

The growing shell is not a burden

to the wanderer inside

who uses it to stay afloat,

and when it’s time, to dive.

 

And thus may we use all we’ve known

and all that we’ve believed

to navigate the sea we’re in

as long as we’re alive.

DNA

DNA

I spat into the tube and sent it off

and now I know:  I descended from a

crabapple tree. A nettle by the river

was my grandfather, but the oak I call

Grandmother is not an ancestor at all.

The snapping turtle I moved from the road,

the wolf spider I met in the garden

scurrying away with her white egg ball,

are second cousins. I am part fox, stillness

on the edge of the meadow. I am part

owl, passing on silent wings. I am thrice

removed from an otter, four times from a deer.

Catbird is my brother—I knew it all along.

We sing the same cobbled-together song.

FIGURE AND GROUND

 

 

VENUS 2

 

 

FIGURE AND GROUND

She is a shadow on the grass. She

is a shadow cast by a star so plain

it bears a simple name. She is a figure

on a ground so vast that even she

can not see herself. Mosses grow under

the grasses. Stars behind the sun. Shadows

follow on, between the eastern mountains

and the field all green and yellow. And each

pebble burns its shadow, and each broken

sparrow on the road’s cold shoulder. And why

would anyone be afraid to die

against this curve of space, this ground of time?

Her breath streams a shadow through still airs.

Passing planets pull dark shadows from their stars.

TO LUCY

TO LUCY

Australopithecus afarensis

 

1.

I sit on the bones of my pelvis

wondering if you looked into my eyes

you’d see an explanation,

a daughter you’d recognize.

 

You would know me by my hands adept with tools.

You’d hear me singing with my friends,

watch me bounce my baby nephew on my knee.

You could meet me on a summer morning,

help me gather arnica and goosefoot greens.

 

So much I want to know of you:

did you fish for termites, crack nuts, chew leaves,

pull strips of flesh from antelopes and birds?

Did you awaken stiff and scared from twitching dreams?

I would tell you that when I wake from mine,

I remember my Nana’s lullabies;

I want to know if someone sang for you.

 

What did you make of your life?

What did you understand?

When it came your time to die, were you afraid?

Were you surprised?

 

2.

Your Great Rift Valley was a careless archivist:

in her sandstone house she stashed

scrapbooks of mysteries,

a trunk of discarded fashions.

She tossed the crumbled pages

of your story in the river, to the wind.

 

Some artist made a grinning baby

of that ball of bones

from Afar’s nipple-pointed hills:

knees, milk teeth, tiny toes,

one finger curled, brown skull

returning from the dust.

 

3.

Through dust of volcanoes

on feet like mine your people walked.

 

I would like to walk

into your landscape:

the yellow grass and scrub,

the seeps and gullies of home.

 

In this cold land of glacial till

and blue lake bottom clay

I press my feet into ground,

footbones with their musical names:

talus, calcaneus, cuboid, navicular,

cuneiform, metatarsal, infantry of phalanges.

 

Across years and continents

these bones have arched their way.

 

Southern Ape from Afar,

where have we arrived,

our footprints everywhere?

 

We trail white vapor through the skies;

broken machines encircle us,

the crawling increase of our kind.

We’ve made our own volcanic air.

Our children are sorted into rooms,

our babies lie crying, all alone.

 

We make beautiful and deadly tools.

Our music would break your heart.

Our lives shatter, our bones come apart.

 

4.

Brooding over you, I dreamed

I lost my way.  I stopped

at a café where they were butchering

a road-kill fawn.  A baby escaped

from my suitcase. I had to walk

home in the dark and I could

not find my shoes.

 

5.

My journals are out of order,

unsorted letters in shoeboxes.

Unnamed ancestors smile in sepia.

In one musty drawer I keep an envelope

with two baby teeth, a cheap bracelet,

my grandmother’s amber beads.

 

Now that I am old,

I need a Nana most of all

to sit with in the dappled shade,

to speak of things encrypted

under layers of language,

this endless chatter in my enormous brain.

 

6.

I cannot look too long

in any eyes.  Before I see

the hawk, I feel its gaze.

There is something wholesome

in the taste of green.

I lie awake when the moon is full

and when the moon is new.

I remember where the plums

and wild asparagus grow.

Even now I know by smell

when the snow will come.

 

7.

How hard, to evolve,

walk down across the land,

feel the twinges of selection:

bones growing longer,

speech changing the brain.

All around the world is turning,

brown and yellow and green.

Stars change the sky.

Do you remember?

Did you know?

Out of time, you walk with me

toward an Earth

as strange and familiar

as that house I sometimes dream

where once we lived,

that house I’ve never seen.                                          .

 

 

 

~ for Barbara J. King 

July 5, 2007