[Image: “Desert Watcher,” by Children of Darklight (user athalfred) on Flickr. (Used here under a Creative Commons license.) This is a composite image: the star trails comprise 76 separate photos, stacked atop one another in (presumably digital) layers; the figure at the lower left is a lightpainted portrait.]
From whiskey river:
Crossing the Swamp
Here is the endless
wet thick
cosmos, the center
of everything—the nugget
of dense sap, branching
vines, the dark burred
faintly belching
bogs. Here
is swamp, here
is struggle,
closure—
pathless, seamless,
peerless mud. My bones
knock together at the pale
joints, trying
for foothold, fingerhold,
mindhold over
such slick crossings, deep
hipholes, hummocks
that sink silently
into the black, slack
earthsoup. I feel
not wet so much as
painted and glittered
with the fat grassy
mires, the rich
and succulent marrows
of earth—a poor
dry stick given
one more chance by the whims
of swamp water—a bough
that still, after all these years,
could take root,
sprout, branch out, bud—
make of its life a breathing
palace of leaves.
(Mary Oliver [source])
Not from whiskey river:
The Origin of Order
Stellar dust has settled.
It is green underwater now in the leaves
Of the yellow crowfoot. Its vacancies are gathered together
Under pine litter as emerging flower of the pink arbutus.
It has gained the power to make itself again
In the bone-filled egg of osprey and teal.One could say this toothpick grasshopper
Is a cloud of decayed nebula congealed and perching
On his female mating. The tortoise beetle,
Leaving the stripped veins of morning glory vines
Like licked bones, is a straw-colored swirl
Of clever gases.At this moment there are dead stars seeing
Themselves as marsh and forest in the eyes
Of muskrat and shrew, disintegrated suns
Making songs all night long in the throats
Of crawfish frogs, in the rubbings and gratings
Of the red-legged locust. There are spirits of orbiting
Rock in the shells of pointed winkles
And apple snails, ghosts of extinct comets caught
In the leap of darting hare and bobcat, revolutions
Of rushing stone contained in the sound of these words.The paths of the Pleiades and Coma clusters
Have been compelled to mathematics by the mind
Contemplating the nature of itself
In the motions of stars. The patterns
Of any starry summer night might be identical
To the summer heavens circling inside the skull.
I can feel time speeding now in all directions
Deeper and deeper into the black oblivion
Of the electrons directly behind my eyes.Flesh of the sky, child of the sky, the mind
Has been obligated from the beginning
To create an ordered universe
As the only possible proof of its own inheritance.
(Pattiann Rogers [source])
…and:
Calculus
Last night I had the strangest dream:
I dreamed of a chain of hundreds of thousands of souls, millions of them, each standing a few feet distant from its neighbors, in a solid row stretching from South to North Pole. (It feels important to stress: these were souls, invisible souls.)
The souls faced north, of course (because everyone agrees that north is up — everyone on Earth, that is; everyone who has ever seen a map printed since the fifteenth century or so). And over their heads, their arms extended, each held a wooden plank, a 1×12, say, several feet long — six feet long, eight feet, twelve (size, as everyone agrees, not mattering). It was like a Morse-coded message on colossal scale, its contents nothing but dashes: dash dash dash, — — — — — — — — — —, marching north along a single longitudinal line.
The point of view shifted to outer space; now I observed the planet from the side. And although distant, I could still see the planks lifted over the souls’ heads. They formed a single straight line no more: instead, their burdens described a semi-circular arc.
But then I imagined a single plank twelve thousand five hundred miles long — half the Earth’s circumference. I imagined this plank being held rigidly over the head of just one impossibly strong soul, standing at the equator. And I wondered: would gravity all along its length pull at the ends of the board, so that it curved to follow the shape of the earth? Suppose that luckless lonely soul holds a flexible wooden board no longer, but a steel girder. Would its ends dip to the poles? Does inflexibility overpower gravity, and if so, at what point? How is flexibility even measured?
(JES)
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