Ode to Science part 3
(A Science of Sympathy)

Those who say life is a dream are asleep
Turning 50 has awakened me
with a clutch of horror
as I now feel the silent suffering
that screeched invisibly before.
Looking past the greening drip 
of geriatric mucous
I've learned to see beauty
in the old woman's clawed and diseased hands.
Some days beauty rises like an orange sunset
smiling on the scream of what life must do to stay alive.
The bear caught in the bear trap does not abolish
the blooming pink of the redbud trees,
 it merely creates the need to outlaw trappers
and game agencies.
In the midst of twilight air fresh with lavender
I wonder who will be forced to suffer next?
What cruel day brings so much terror to town
in the midst of so many spring flowers?
How do I accept the beauty of dying?
I fear the lightning that shatters ordinary lives.
Shall I take down statistics with a cool pen
looking down glasses at the end of my nose,
when mother elephants are massacred with their babies?
That's not science. If that is science,
 I don't want anything to do with it, Katy Payne said and I agree.
But that is not science.
If one who I love fell down on the trail and was dying,
what kind of science
would teach me to leave her behind
and feel no regret?
How do I study sorrow in the flight of falling flower petals?
How do I assess the pain animals suffer at the hands of men
or accept the sad old woman who dying now alone?
How do I study that with science?
We ask our questions not to gain power or take possession
but to address the silence of so much suffering.
The wrinkled hand that quivers nearly purple on the fresh sheet.
The only science left worth a name is sympathy.

I will never step outside science’s door again
but no science is outside sympathy
I was wrong to think there was any inside or outside.
Everything is threshold--- the about to understand,
the receptive curiosity of a child.
I was born with science in my eyes, seeking.
It was the misuse of science that hurt me
and sent me the wrong way.
I’m getting clear about that now.
The “technical arrogance” that corpsed Hiroshima,
bloodied Einstein’s red-shifted  fingers,
guided Mengele’s  scalpel into the eyes of twins
who looked forward, cross-eyed, from 1945
and saw today’s gene splicer’s and their grotesqueries.
The science that deforms fish for profit
and feeds cow parts back to cows
is something I don’t quite have a name for.
”Greenwash” and “Junk science” express mere complicity.
They claim science to profit form what they kill.
Real science is something else.
The only science left worth a name is sympathy.

I imagine a science that refuses to wrestle with crocodiles---
refuses bombs and bloody crosses, 
rejects bigots of human centeredness
loves Orangutan’s hands
loves the sensitivity of Frog skin
the ballooning throat of a singing Toad
the baby Oriole’s sweet begging out of the hidden bush
the crimson underside of a Kelp Crab.
What is the word for science in a Loon’s language?
The tongue that tree bark speaks,
echoes like copper leaves above the Grand Canyon,
like Albatross bones getting confused in driftwood.
For years I blamed science for
the dirty business of god’s greedy adventurers.
There was no science with Pizzarro or Columbus
Science was not on the Enola Gay
it walks with frog's feet on leaves
just below where the last Hawaiian Honey-creeper sleeps.

Yes, I imagine a science without caged animals,
Without inquisitors that turn inquiry into invasions.
A rainbow of Macaws flies in fear
from silver spears and Spanish Helmets.
The Spanish Helmets have become satellites,
hovering over the Amazon
looking for stock options.
as the rainbow of Macaws nears extinction.
 

I refuse the obscure because knowing is clarity.
Thoreau called it "intelligence with sympathy"
“Light on a bank side in autumn”.
river-light, the White-Tailed Kites red eye
or the red eye of a Black Crowned Night Heron
looking at me looking.
A science of sympathy that harms no harp seal
heals wounds, soothes cancers,
a science that whistleblows on corporations,
tree-sits to save Beeches and Redwoods,
touches Whale foreheads in San Ignacio Lagoon.
looks forward to regenerate flower petals
of children’s faces laughing,
Jane Goodall’s laughing chimpanzees,
Mozart’s finger’s playing,
Magnolia warbler singing clear notes
up into the morning light.
The only science left worth a name is sympathy.

 March. 07