Explore Poems: Sciences

I remember first hearing rumors
of the atom. We are all made up
of crumbs, Q told me
when we were kids.…

It's a rush, a sploosh of sewage, twenty thousand cubic metres being pumped in, stirred and settled …

One man and one woman park the government Jeep
on the gravel shoulder of the Grand River watershed.
Paired…

Rotor wash, or the downward-flowing
Air by which our helicopters formed
Imprints in the jungle grass beneath
Now stands effectively for Vietnam
Because our understanding of that war
Omitted many things but not the wind
We bowed our heads and fled. In this case we

Refers effectively...

SIR, the 28 spheres of Kamen’s harmony

Susceptible, inferred, immense, actual - the electron microscopy provides images of the virus long in memories.

It shows grey spinning, transforming this (I point to the past fifteen months) into orbs.

Here they are, grown enormous, before you in place, not within you in space. For what else can it become but the potential for indifferent attractiveness.

A memory, this spread; a novel micrography.

The SIR diagram is a mirror that creates a migratory pattern in the mind, as one would imagine birds flying, out of sight.
Of birds then. The diagram is a symbol that brings nets down, and what gets trapped in nets, as it is expelled from our hands, and rid by water, is a thing, that reflects, traces, and symbolizes.

Both the virus, and us.

The universe participates in making the artist well, and an instigator.

The participation of the invisible moves the virus into view.

A speck, a spread, a tiny writing in the air, a diagram, an avian metaphor, an object installed to illuminate. All of this, completely noiseless.

And this is why I write to you, in order to not speak the word, and have it just be seen.

We've always been out looking for answers,
telling stories about ourselves,
searching for connection, choosing
to send out Stravinsky and whale song,
which, in translation, might very well be
our undoing instead of a welcome.

We launch satellites, probes, telescopes
unfolding like origami, navigating
geomagnetic storms, major disruptions.
Rovers...

I have built a machine to visit the stars.
I have built a machine to outlast the stars.
There is a glass ball inside a copper egg.

There are dynamos and turbines, Tesla coils and magnets.
There is a boy in Brooklyn, Wisconsin
and a...

Here is the encyclopedia where I learn first position
Here is where I begin ballet: at 12, in a class of 6-year-olds
Here is where I get my period
Here is where I substitute dance for childhood
Here is studio “B” where I practice
Here...

A body must remind itself
to keep living, continually,
throughout the day.

Even at night while sleeping,
proteins, either messenger, builder,
or destroyer, keeps busy

transforming itself or other substances.
Scientists call these reactions
—to change their innate structure,
dictated by DNA—cellular frustration,

a cotton-cloud nomenclature for crusade,
combat, warfare, aid,...

1. Who needs water with so many wings?
2. A Dewey Decimal System for feathers.
3. The librarian in the trees says, “Quiet!”
4. "I felt an intimacy with [birds]...bordering on frenzy [that] must accompany my steps through   life." –John James Audubon.
5. Bird...

Lately, I've enlisted an app on my phone to keep track
            of the time that I can't witness—it maps the dark blanket
of missing consciousness, a jagged line. Best night/worst night,

it says, though I remember neither....

We know the last stuffed specimen of the dodo burned
             in 1755, though Wikipedia's "Dodo: Talk" page shows
sources conflict on whether the fire was an accident

or intentional. They say it had started to smell. The...

Diagram of a diagram: if properly decoded,
                                                                   ...

The research center is a cube building with a neat chimney plunged into the right side. The researchers are covered head to toe in white cloth. Unrelatedly, they are sexless. They don't draw lakes in forests. They don't play classic...

Vigilant for so long, 
I am full.                                                                     ...

An ulcer develops inside my lower lip in crevasse of gumline, the translucent milky gray pocks oral mucosa landscape of dark pink & I remember my flesh incubates; a home for short-lived tenets evolving a kind of thought come to...

What is death to us? We've heard that myth,
a ghost story to tell around a camp fire.
We're too busy to think. Our copies constantly

clamor around our waists like children. They rush
from their cramped classrooms into the red light
of the first...

It’s strange artwork, perhaps voodoo,
a human skull strung in perfect symmetry
to a tree in Mount Kenya forest,
it’s grinning away a sole bullet hole

now jagged. It certainly adds a twist
to the aeolian harp, doesn’t it? Art
is inspired in many ways,
here it’s...

How, Alan Turing thought, does the soft-walled,
jellied, symmetrical cell
become the asymmetrical horse? It was just before dusk,
the sun's last shafts doubling the fence posts, 
all the dark mares on their dark shadows. It was just
after Schrödinger's What is Life?
not long before Watson,...

I didn’t know the details.
I feared the details.
I loved the details.

The details, said etymology,
were our first cuttings. De-

tailor, did you know
where you came from?
From taliare, to split:

talea, a stick
companionably unstuck.

Long enough to look
at the realities
of luck:

wishbones,
each to one’s own

taste of...