Ode to Science 6
(The
Science of the Overlooked)
When
will I learn the things my cells already know?
The question my body asks
is about what science does not know yet,
that something out there that is also inside me
far ahead of my slow wit
yet still behind me in paleohistory.
I mean nothing spiritual but nothing cynical either,
I have no complaint about the impermanent grit of sidewalks
or holes in my raincoat that leaves you drenched.
No, I mean, we are all born under the same sky---
--- the ocean is under all of our skins---
what jellyfish through their own diaphane see
what otters though kelp forest intuit---
shake free of sandgrains like a worm on a sidewalk
and feel the rain slap the silver puddles.
Imagine that, I say to myself:
there is no glass in this looking glass,
there is just looking itself, without glass
through the senses at a world more than human—
yes, not supernatural but natural---
natural and more than human:
imagine that:
the meaning of the world is frog skin:
imagine
how earth wide life and minds
sprang forth from archebacteria and
here and now the ‘small majority’
of frogs and insects reign unseen.
The world is the opposite of what you were always taught
and
I have gone over to their side
these little beings ignored and abused by humans,
scythed down with lawnmowers,---
the Amazonian tree canopy mauled by tree mashers
--you
can see the Amazon burning form outer space---
making land for hamburger’s cattle
until Katydids and so many others go extinct
and all because humans are shut
in their own mental-nets,
inzoned in the intrazone
trapped in ignorant arrogance
synced to the social web of car phones
corralled in computers of boxed perceptions
making themselves and all the earth
into products to be consumed.
Don’t let poetry be a “shopping experience”
or an eco-tourist’s holiday---
say no to the spiritual muzak
that holds you in a stylish cocoon of cool.
I never
mind all that.
Start again:
I go back to the question:
When will I learn the things my cells already know?
The question my body asks
is about what science does not know yet,
I’m asking what I share in common
with flatworms, milkweed beetles and dragonflies?
Down to where biology meets existence in the question
about:
what do bird tongues have to do with my own speech?
what life in me looks when I look?
what science begins there,
where science is threshold
understood in a new way
and nothing has been measured yet?
Imagine that---
where imagination is not yet
beginning where Endgame ended:
beyond Beckett’s lost world.
Where
what is there is all there is here
in this tiny part of the world
aside from the sidewalks
under these rust-belt leaves,
in my own heart and yours
under this only sky,
nowhere but us and here now.
Imagine that
you finally
find yourself at home in the very place
that you most wanted to leave,
and you look without imagination at what actually is
Imagine:
at last you will learn to accept yourself
as the lost seeker you have always been
looking for a science of the overlooked
close to the ground and up close
to beetles, peepers, chipmunks
and snow fleas---- not as metaphor
for what really matters
but as what really matters.
Earth is the all of it:
even when I turn back and look at myself looking
I can see there is no way but here
however cramped and cruel the facts are
however noisy the insults of sidewalks
however the horrors unresolved
and the burning being of questions
there is only this earth
via the wonder and pain of the obvious
and the given present of the tragic miracle
of our existing evolution together.
July, 07
