Ode To Science 8
Eight Little
Odes to Seeing Ourselves From Outer Space.
1.
If I’m “nothing more”
than matter that knows how to think
Im proud to be this “nothing”.
It is really something to be that which
religion has no knowledge of
—with all its denial of the earthly---
I’m not ashamed to Descartes anymore.
The “nothing more” that I am is nothing less
than this amazing something
that knows that no one knows what it is---
this delicate membrane of life on earth---
this amazing flutterwing of moments
this still beating warmth of life
This mind that accepts being part of matter
this is the endlessly short span of my life.
2.
I woke late from my favorite delusions,
wasting never returning youth’s vain castles of sandy thought
Fell down in a rain of medieval vanity.
I left behind religion’s ephemeral onion peels
stinking of an a delusional eternity that never was---
I started looking at the obvious,
and I opened up like fog parting over the continents,
river cliffs suddenly appeared,
jungle flowers, and the sea
blow-hole mist from a whale’s spout---
showing me how breathlessly wonderous it is
than anyone can breathe at all.
3.
Fragile as a turtle on its back, trying to right itself,
I flounder and fear
the creaking hinges of my own perceptual doorways.
Yet, even as the Arctic ice shelf is slipping off the Arctic
while no one notices all the birds and frogs dying
and in the midst of my failing body and the wild world
dying all around us unnoticed
I still feel the Milky Way pulse in my brain.
I didn’t quite use up my life for nothing, did I?
I inch toward now dim understandings.
I try to hold to the factual and the actual.
I am one whose confidence in his own kind collapsed
like the lungs of a bullet punctured animal---
yet the lonely rag of wonder flaps against my face
like a shred of silken galaxies.
The web of earthen relations hangs by thin threads
from all our faces, barely holding onto existence.
4.
People who don’t respect what I have to say,
used to make me want to talk less or hide.
But one must cast a cold eye on slander
and assert a ragged and forgotten beauty.
I learn to ignore those who hate me.
Society is a kangaroo court.
I don’t want poetry to be a slave to an audience.
I want to give my feeling-mind to inquiry, not popularity,
science, not the rule of an arbitrary and superstitious tribe.
Science must move slowly and imitate nature
and nature is about hiding spaces and evolving unseen.
There are plenty who will offer you entertaining escapes.
But it is another question I am asking….
--does art matter on a planet floating through empty light years?
Yes, well then, what does it mean to be thinking matter
feeling into vast spaces? ---
Sometimes I can hardly stand
feeling the sorrowing mysteries of earth’s tragic turnings?
Sometimes I exult in the facts if it.
How do we create an organic art that will help preserve nature?
I think of the pain that went into the art of bird wings;
the pain of extinctions during the Cretaceous; of the
17 species of Lemur and primates now extinct in Madagascar
---and I used to think I knew where I was going---
but now all I know is:
that earth is all there is
and I create beauty while in the midst of mourning.
5.
When the road begins to steer itself
the sad song sings blue.
The forests of Madagascar, Papua
and Brazil are being cut down
Blue dust is overheating the earth
blue dust on violet moths at twilight,
blue fungus killing the frogs
blue dust is falling over our blue planet
Sad stars in the blue dust are singing.
From the red planet, Mars, this earth where I am
looks like blue sorrows swirling
in the dust of beauty’s invisible glass.
The Blue Whale is crying in the blue mist
there are only a few thousand Blue Whale left
---I wonder if the whales know that?
The blood of the sea was heaving
with Whale deaths slung against ship sides.
How do explain these murders in the midst of so much wonder?
Humans are sickening the earth with so much killing.
This blue globe where I am blue dust
is like a tiny dot in a vast landscape---
this Sahara and Amazon of all that I don’t know---
this fallible grasping at knowing the unknown,
this faint rainbow shinning on frozen cloud crystals;
this globe of dying hope.
It is this subtle love of between facts that keeps me alive.
It is not the fictional "Self", not not self,
but the reality of the salamander
and the killer car that races toward it.
It is part of the streets now,
part of the suffering of Rain Forest animals,
part of the fact that the human species is killing so many
without remorse,
part of my own failing face is falling
blue dust is raining
like my innocent childhood seen from outer space,----
---I can see my childhood betrayed
I can see the healing bones of my broken and adult hopes,
now like an ant walking on the edge of a tin can
like the way I keep trying to create meaning
even though I know the end is coming---
ashes and blue dust on my own dead face
the ashes and blue dust of those who abuse science
and then suddenly comes the awareness
of the fact that it is not all an illusion,
and I know “maya” is what never was,
----row, row, row your boat because life is NOT a dream
Hinduism is a lie—Taoism is a lie
and only the ‘ten thousand things’ are real,---
these same Beetles and Horse flies,
these very leaves and chrysalises---
and then I know it all means something
and, in fact, just at the moment when the meaning
seems to come crumbling down again
I build it back up again and
I give up blue dust and
I realize Tree Kangaroos matter
and rare fish (cichlids) in Lake Victoria
are the meaning of the world’s map.
And O,
I am so glad that they found
the 400 million year old Coelacanths
of the coast of Africa and Indonesia.
6.
It not just the
helplessness of the earth’s
relentless rainbow turning sun into sunrises and sets
nor the anxious dread of knowing
that you can’t ever get out of it---
no, I do understand that
no matter what I do, there is no escape from earth,
and I want no escape
there is only the ‘here’ and the fact of existing
and that is OK.
It has to be OK--- there is no other choice.
yes,
it is not just that this
grief over how they are killing the earth
that must sing itself out,,
I see the beauty is dying all around me
even as it is dying inside me.
It is a question of accepting this at last:
accepting and fighting it as best I can.
There is no point in running away from the obvious
since I can’t run away from my own legs.
I am learning to live a little distant
from all the unreasonable stars that sink skyless into my gut
when I realize I will one day
I not be able to see this sky again.
7.
I am a little less of a coward lately.
I don’t know what it is all about
but I do know that when surrealism is your waking condition
Dali, Ernst and Duchamp seem silly.
I am on the other side of the unreal at last
looking for the clear and pragmatic facts
sick of blue dust and Plato’s figmented dreams.
I am on the other side of Nietzsche’s eternal return.
He was wrong. I know we never return.
This moment on earth is it.
Celebrate these eyelashes, flower petals
and the secret dancing language of bee wings.
This earth you stand on is all you will ever have.
this owl at twilight is the secret of being alive.
I count the wooden ties between the train tracks.
I count snow flakes that fall on falling leaves.
8.
I refuse to sing you songs of escape anymore.
Do not come to me to hide behind a Buddhist calm.
I am vegetarian and will not stuff my mouth
with the fat steak of the Holy Spirit
I am going though myth withdrawal.
It is painful to remember why life
used to matter to me so much.
It matters more than ever at the same time where
In old photos,
I’ve seen that nobody seems to notice
under their white, delusional umbrellas
that the black man was lynched just as now no one cares as men chop up
a Chimp’s body as bushmeat for loggers.
It is raining suffering all around
from Iraq War to the person right next to you,
Who will stop the hand that holds the machete
who will break the cage for the Scarlet Macaws.
A thousand rainbows made of birds
are flying trapped in fear around the earth.
I am on the verge of understanding
that the meaning of beauty is
the turning and turning of the
planet---
all the rainbow birds set free.
"Somehow I feel the globe itself, swift, swimming in space."
Walt Whitman said in 1890.
Yes, you must feel that the earth’s fragility
is what your own body and being is all.
So many refuse assent to the delicate membrane
of the earth.
So many are tele-marketed into the
closed circuit
self-regard of human centeredness.
Just when it all seems hopeless
I begin to grasp that it really is just us.
No one else. I am alone here with Chipmunks,
Aspens, Anteaters and Polar Bears and you.
There is only the turning earth and up till now
I have been buried in delusions of my own making.
I am waking up, at last, perhaps a little too late
and realizing for the first time
we are alone on this planet
alone together with other forms of life
and it is up to us to keep the beauty alive.
Feb. 08