Odes to Science

Earth, moon and Milky Way

 

 

 

 

 

Ode To Science # 9

To Stephen Hawking

 

Stephen Hawking,
locked for years now,
in a disabled body,

(he has Motor Neurone Disease),

has fought himself over his disability
and refused the bitter escape into religion
others have fallen into.

With a mind that has touched the infinite limits

of space and time,
he does not believe

in Taoist fantasies or
Jesus and Buddha;
he does not sound a ritual gong
to announce himself before lectures;
he does not see Zen emptiness
behind everyday phenomena in life;

he does not swing myrrh censers at
Byzantine ceremonies. 
Unable even to talk, except though
an amazing computer attached
to his wheel chair, he is the only man
I know of who is able to say
that Einstein wasn’t that good at Math.
Despite his restricted isolation

he joins no monastery
and does not condemn the
the misnamed “secular world”.
There is no real spiritual/secular distinction,
as if the two terms were equal.
Only the secular is real,
only the earth and sky matter.
Non-existent spiritual worlds do not trouble him.
He’s no love-sick Rumi
longing for an non-existant lover behind the sky.

He accepts the facts of his hard existence
with a certain humor that reaches
from Kew Gardens
to far distant Black Holes.
In him, science has finally defeated religion.
Hawking as said
     "We are such insignificant creatures
       on a minor planet of a very average star
       in the outer suburb of one of a hundred
       billion galaxies.
       So it is difficult to believe in a God
       that would care about us
       or even notice our existence."

Yes, The fabric of species on earth
is amazing and self-generated.
Precisely because there is no god
species alone deserve the credit
of having arisen through evolution
on our own.

On our own!! Think of that—we did it ourselves!!!
Life needs no fictional gods to begin or to continue!!
We need no priests to direct us.
We are the self-created, the self-perpetuated,
the proud children of a spherical-sapphire
of the sapphirical earth.

Hawking loves his daughter and math and
the mystery of existence
and that is enough for him.

I admire his clear mind and doubt
 he would want me to praise his “courage”.
I admire his hard struggle with a self-pity which he has not yet conquered even as he might pretend it is not there.
He has refused to turn his bodily sufferings
into a metaphor for a “spiritual” hatred or the world.
He shows me the poetry of a world
that is not metaphorical:
he enables me to imagine
a poetry without metaphor:
the plain rhymeless poetry of science.

 

Ode To Science 8

Eight  Little Odes to Seeing Myself 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

 

Ode to Science 7 (Ode to Evolution ) 1. Even if I did photograph the new wrinkles on my hands, it won’t stop leaves crumbling though empty time. A least my babies hands look a little like mine ----that is some consolation. The lunar eclipse I saw  Aug. 27th 2007 a few weeks ago showed me concretely that the earth spins around the sun--- since I could see the shadow of the earth pass over the slowly-turning-crimson-moon. The eyelid of a lizard blinks tearlessly. Flower petals under moonlight, are like the closed eyelids of snow leopard. I have felt the huge rocks of Southwest Wyoming lift up their heads like giant Iguana and reveal an underbelly of mouth opening sandstone red as a throat of gulleted terracotta. Face paint serves a purpose like the red gula pouches of Frigate Birds, red and blue Mandrill Butts  look like blue and red Mandrill Faces from far away. Perfect  replicas of Owl eyes or Monkey faces look out of Butterfly  an Moth with no one being able to e explain exactly how they got there. Natural selection’s amazing artistry is far older and better drawn than Chauvet caves. Let's value Manikin Dances, Turkey Wattles or Chameleon skin as much as Rembrandts.

Eclipse fo the moon, Aug 27, 2007

 

Turkeys Mating Dancing March 2007
 

We are alive here on the earth,
seemingly still as pitcher plants
yet that is an illusion---
because earth is always shifting
and sliding over molten pools.
I recently saw geysers,
‘Artist’s Paint Pots’, and other places in Yellowstone,
boiling a palette of primary blood oranges
sulphuric ochres, beryl blues.
Our humble beginnings are in
Cyanobacteria and thermophiles,

Life originated in these rainbow hued steam vents in a boil of starry elements, amino acids and heat. Blue green algae created most of the world’s oxygen Sunshine and cell patterns precede creation myths. Life is not the creation of fictional gods but of colored minerals, sun and calderas. These prismatic springs Burned rainbows into the corners of my eyes and I look godless into the sad and steaming future like a Midnight Chameleon about to burst into a flame of meteor showers raining stars over ancient jungles.

 

Thermophile mats in the Grand Prismatic Spring. Yellowstone National Park, Sept. 07

 

Crater Lake, Oregon, Golden Mantled ground Squirrel (2007)

2. Bloody toothed T-Rexes might seduce you into natural history museums but sensationalism is not what evolution is about. Evolution is the hump of the buffalo or the split lip of lamas and Guanacos the ring shaped brains of star fish my own fingernails or my longing for my wife. Crater Lake blew its top off only 7000 years ago. How the galaxies turn in their spirals is one thing, but that does not yet explain tree fern spores on sand grains. Does my small finger relate me the three toed sloth, who doesn’t have one? I need to think a lot about this to understand bodies. Bryzazoa colonies, Radiolaria, Jelly fish, Horse bodies, Horseshoe crab bodies, cat bodies, human bodies, bilateral symmetry, dendritic patterns of veins and arteries--- what are bodies about? Splayed sections of an orange ooze seeds. What relates the throb in my head to Watermelons--- to water pouring off cliffs-- or to thermophile bacteria on under-sea vents? My fingernails know baking deserts and my cheeks flowering rabbit brush. Eyes are plush mosses gone crystal. Most life has to keep moving, if we want to live. What cooling molten earth crust we live on floating plates over seas of lava, shaking subduction zones. We unconsciously quiver while sleeping, the mind racing unknown to itself quick as hagfish on the deep sea bottom. Snakes pause and then move under grasses, the osprey clutches a fish glistening sliver--- ---Think and feel it though--- like Lichens we can stay in one place for centuries, eons…. if the families will only remain--- but nothing is static, even the self I thought I was 10 years ago is largely gone, It is true that life opposes entropy since reproduction is all about not being killed right away by time. DNA trumps time, twists against the spiraling of galaxies, fights to keep the children alive. Yes, what a marvel of stiff emerald or ruby strength holds up the primordial dragonfly still hovering today over the Jurassic pond?

Egg sack ( slug or salamander ?)     Cherry Faced Meadowhawk or Flame Skimmer? Dragonfly

 

3. A half hour after my mother died I felt her cold forehead and then gave her a hug and her back was still warm, all the warm blood still pooling there. Days later, her poor bones burned into ashes, looked sandy still and the hush of her absence cast dead time over my silent wishes  that maybe she could live just a little longer. ---- life after death is a lie I realized in the look of my dead mother’s eyes ---only species survive--- How fragile our bodies are and how we float in the world like jellyfish, membranes of cells quivering so vulnerable, and always moving to stay alive in spite of space, in spite of the press and downward pull of a cold universe. Come then, and touch softly this tingle of gelatinous being--- this flesh that is all there is the delicious hope of the sex act that takes place in mind and body free of Christian lies gravity and decayed corpes?

Pelagia colorata Medusa Jellyfish (2006)

 

The marvel of evolution flows from fern fingers spreading spores
to my spread fingers open as a fan of bright flowers
and my glad smile,  blond as golden Tamarins.
What a marvel is evolution, this painful prism of glory,
this rainbow array of threatened
beings who want to be safe.
Survival of the safest.
What harm are mollusks at sunset,
dreams of Delphiniums or pots
of plants on the stairway?
Go wherever you like
this is the flower of your feeling, this earth---
this fringe of the leaf that keeps you alive
this curve of your eye on the arc of the horizon
that calls you to the pulse of your own heart
beating
a way to want to live a little longer.
Come out of the sea at last, and embrace
 the cold cruelty of this beautiful earth, blindingly awake
dreamless in a sharpened point of loveliness and fear,
only one life
and this exuberance of sweat and leaves drenched in colors and sorrows.
Heartbreak is the rounded shell of new lives coming forth.
This is the essential shape of all necessary shelter,
this round revolving place, earth, evolving
where my daughter’s determined and wild hair
reaches me back to days when chimps
chased ancestors up the squirrelly trees---
Lemurs at twilight were about to leap into language.
Language grows like Sequoia still where raven-speaks,
Scissor tails fly and the howler monkey’s dark green screams.
Why do you think baby chimps, fawns and baby squirrels
 are all so leaping crazy?
Evolution crawls with salamanders out of the forested
streams and Life like crystal
laughter is something that is smiling in silence
precious and pulsing with blood, pain and joy
and the difficult and musical earth turning a million years fast
With all our variety upon it, nurtured.
Yes, I say yes.

Oct. 07

           Tree Frog, Ca. (2007)

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

 

 

 Sunflower sea star. Trinadad, Ca. 2005

Octopus, winter 2007

 

Ode to Science 5 (Calling for respect for Ocean’s Rights) If the water of my eyes could finally see its origin and look at the ocean though a tearless lens I could swim with hammerhead sharks and watch Cuddlefish light up like auroras. I’d like to spread my thoughts out in many directions like an Octopus’s suckered arms and change colors, all at once, thinking new thoughts like multicolored lights blushing in the deep. Maybe we could save the seas if we could wake all up the dead Bison under seas of waving Prairie grasses and hear the ocean thunder in their run ----and we could trample down fences all the way to the end of global warming. What if a billion Passenger pigeons swimming though the air pollution that browns the Midwestern sky could suddenly return and give America a second chance to respect their existence? O, I wish I could feel the pelt of rain with a Silverback crouched in the the Congo basin or understand water as a whale does. If I could stretch my imagination like sunshine across the earth’s big belly maybe I could fly home to the Gulf of Mexico again like a long string of Whooping Cranes and see the unpolluted Mississippi snaking far below me, returning to an Island in the sea to mate. Id like to feel the day is done after running all the way across frozen Lake Huron and lay down with wolves in a snowy scintilla of stars. If I could teach humans to see though the eyes of Mice in cages, Beavers talking in their lodge, a Fox sleeping with her babies in her den, human life would be less blinded in traffic lost and lonely , caught in the circuits, unaware of all the death this causes. Brazilian bankers shed no tears for the burning Amazon nor do Indonesian loggers feel the pain when the orangutan falls, its orange hair on fire. The War on Nature cuts forests, rapes seas and I wish I could teach feeling to men who kill for wages or weekend pleasures, shooting Coots and Cinnamon Teals, or reeling in a Swordfish for an office wall trophy. But what do my wishes matter? It’s time I looked at reality what does it mean to say “I’d like to” or, “what if I could”, in a world where wishes perish facing real corpses--- just as a shimmer of bluefin Tuna corralled into a drift net, are slapped into cans on processing ships. Corporate flesh eaters ravage the sea’s buffalo ---Just as they cropped the land with cornfed and voracious cattle, leeched soils and spoiled streams, so the waves of cod are sickled and hauled drowning in air to wet markets, bloody concrete in Boston and Seattle. They scrape the mother-womb of the sea with dragnets scouring sea stars and flounder skewering sea turtles hooking albatross on long lines. Industrial catch after catch battens black the hatch of the mysteries of the sea. It is like killing your own mother, Pearl divers, violence against Abalone, Herring, sea world prisons for dolphins, cyanide killing endangered tropical fish, We need to boycott pet stores, lobster sellers, murderers of sharks and red rockfish. I watch a desperate crab crawl out of a container on a crab boats in Humboldt Bay, and a fishermen stuffs it back in to be cracked open in a luxury restaurant. For millions of years Sealions gather on beaches sunning on sea sprayed seastacks, Or flying through the liquid kelp beds lithe birds of the sonar deeps. Fisherman scapegoat Sealions to hide their own guilt for overfishing the seas. They illegally shoot them swimming behind the boat. I pick up a dead sting ray at the fish packaging plant in Eureka And feel like evolution has become the liquid of my fingers. I am less and less alien to the sea-liquid of my cells and eyes. The ocean precedes my 'essence': The sea is wet in the slosh of my subjectivity diatoms wash out the gods in the sea froth. The sea wakes its razor of motherhood in my salty veins. But just as the sea has begun to remember itself in me I realize how threatened the oceans really are. I eat no fish, because I know they are killing the seas. The sea is our mother and she is looking though me at you. I find myself saying over and over in my head: Eat no fish: oceans are dying Eat no fish: oceans are dying.   I think it is six or seven years now I have eaten no fish. . May, 07…………………………..       Ode to Science Part 4 ( Our Wounded Planet) What a dear lonely globe, this most precious wounded planet, a broken home to us all grateful and ungrateful alike. Im trying to take off my illusions for you strip down to wehere skin meets fern spores. I am learning to trust my senses, reject traditional opinions, test hypotheses in the light of day let the sun shine on ‘clear and distinct ideas’. Earth, I want to be strong enough to see you as you are. I have already faced the loss of myth. All the god’s are gone, Jesus gone, Buddha gone, Plato’s dreams, Hinduism, Thunder Beings, goddesses, Dasien, Atma, all gone…. and gone too, a faith in capital and Marx and all those figments, fictions all gone….. I look at wildflowers alone, the beauty way is not Navaho--- no one owns it--- the tree frog calls out in the rain and the earth under my feet, at last, alone with our earth--- ---try to really feel the lonely winter of this --- the wonder of standing and existing on this exact patch of earth--- this, where you are, is all there is--- this endangered patch--- our earth and those who are upon it--- together, you and me and our earth you and me and the baby and earth you and me and swallows and clouds, the sound of water and the sad goodbye to those who we loved that are dying, our cat is dying, my mother is dying..... So this is it, this all there is, a Jerusalem Cricket dying on our sidewalk, no afterlife for a cricket or for me, this lonely day and the flowers still blooming and the strength it took to give up those illusions to face the empty facts of my full life and saying yes to suffering and beauty at last, and this salt and sand chiseled driftwood we brought home from the ocean this need to make a place for our baby to grow up, this love of sea life, octopi, sunflower sea stars, here is where science begins in the love of the sad sea the infinity of a world  that is not a dream,--- --- life was never a dream, such expanses of unknown space, raw stones, cities with too many people, roadkills, days lost in dazed memories and the small hope that we will come to understand it, make the world better for the coming people, protect nature, let forests return, save Madagascar Lemurs, stop the meat crazed logging in the Amazon,  free rivers of dams hold on to what is lovable about this dear planet. Only do science that does no harm, refuse the rest. Science begins where we face the lonely earth I open my hands open to the flourishing rainbow sky and wake up to the preciousness of each being, each flower, these days and lives that will never be again. Yes, say yes to helping others on this strange and fragile planet so many sad faces suffering so many flowers, and sunsets under so many beautiful stars.   May, 07 l

 

 

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

Ode to Science [part 2]
(Viewing Saturn from a godless Earth)
 

The great Nasa photos
from the-Cassini-Huygens mission
show how the luminous rings of Saturn float, revolve
float
in a mystery of space whose infinite
existence has no explanation----
and I remember all the nights in which I’ve stood
viewing joy on a godless earth
looking up at the Milky way
over the curved horizon of earth or sea
and from somewhere in me deeper than bones or brains
such a huge weightless question arises
as to why,
why this existence and its immensity?
If the lens of Polomar or Hubbell were my eye
would it help me see why there is life is on earth?
I don’t believe anymore
that the universe
had a beginning or was ever created.
What if the Big bang theory is mistaken--- as maybe likely---
there must have been a beginning before the beginning--
and thus Existence always was whether anyone
was there to see it or not.
Once I realized the gods are dead,
or rather never lived---were imagined figments---,
false entities, less than plastic dinosaurs---
I discarded them and
saw the earth is all the life we have---
this life that is “once only” is more than enough.
I stand without religion as a tree stands
feeling the way its being flowers cherry blossoms,
my watery eyes hold mountains and mist
and jungles full of parrots in them.
What amazements of fig wasps and geckos,
Yucatan meteor craters watery with multicolored corals!
I saw Andromeda Galaxy and the Orion Nebula
through the 10 inch telescope at the
Cleveland Museum of Natural History and felt them all
the way though my legs down to my toes.
To see these things in reality and not just in photo form
Made me feel them as part of my own skeletal structure,
What I was born with….

Science is being opened eyed
to the hardly noticed obviousness of things---
listening and watching to the
the sky-pond of meanings
the lakes, forest, starry ocean currents of lives,
species grown
from stone and sea and sunny black obsidian
and a firey gash of molten rock in volcanic ash.
The planet breathes red tides and hurricanes,
snow caps and mustard seasons
the migrations of millions of birds every fall.
We study plants or stars
to learn to live with ourselves
star charting our own blood,
speaking like pollen to the wind.
To really know our world
means to know that my heart
is the wind that water chimes in my mind,
my eyes come from mountains,
your lungs breathe ages
and our bones are dinosaur relations.
The more you let earth into your mind
the more the heart
undoes the lust to kill to conquer and to eat meat.

Seeing through the eyes of other beings
creates the desire to coexist
not just with those you love,
but with Lampreys, Manta Rays, huge Beetles
Deer Fly, dangerous Bears and a sea that can kill you.
I am pine needles, falling acorns, mangoes,
the flatworm in the muddy water.
I am cloud, dirt, wave crashing,
the hydras arms, reaching for more life.
How did I come to be, Oak tree?
Even when my parched old body is dying
let me remember
I was born with butterflies.
I come from where dew comes from.
Butterflies land on my face in the morning and drink dew.
Let these flowers of understanding breathe sun rising
on the miracle of the human mind
trying to love and see the earth in the same vision,
all at once,
living the life of whales traveling up the coast
and Curlew’s crying in the mudflats and minnows
in the eddies of a summer stream
and how mice feelingly seek with whiskers in the dark
and how the mind of a child creates a new phrase
never used before by anybody.
What a marvelous world to be born into
how the eyes of a baby Pronghorns
trust its parents in the Nevada expanse
so many babies, I think of them all---
Rhinos, Gorillas or Horses, kittens and my own child.
Now I am old enough to sometimes weary
I miss my youth when I could fly
and run for hours without fatigue!
My 2 year old daughter whirls
like a gyroscope on turning planet.
The Rooster at dawn crows the happiness
of the living earth spinning around once again.
Saturn floats in the infinity of space
like a duck waking up on the midnight waters.

Jan. 07

 

 

Ode to Science [part 2]

 

The great Nasa photos
from the-Cassini-Huygens mission
show how the luminous rings of Saturn float, revolve
float
in a mystery of space whose infinite
existence has no explanation----
and I remember all the nights in which I’ve stood
looking up at the Milky way
over the curved horizon of earth or sea
and from somewhere in me deeper than bones or brains
such a huge weightless question arises
as to why,
why this existence and its immensity?
If the lens of Polomar or Hubbell were my eye
would it help me see why there is life is on earth?
I don’t believe anymore
that the universe
 was ever created.
What if the Big bang theory is mistaken--- as maybe likely---
there must have been a beginning before the beginning---
and thus Existence always was whether anyone
was there to see it or not.
Once I realized the gods are dead,
or rather never lived---were imagined figments---,
false entities, less than plastic dinosaurs---
I discarded them and
saw the earth is all the life we have---
this life that is “once only” is more than enough.
I stand without religion as a tree stands
feeling the way its being flowers cherry blossoms,
my watery eyes hold mountains and mist
and jungles full of parrots in them.
What amazements of fig wasps and geckos,
Yucatan meteor craters watery with multicolored corals!
I saw Andromeda Galaxy and the Orion Nebula
through the 10 inch telescope at the
Cleveland Museum of Natural History and felt them all
the way though my legs down to my toes.
To see these things in reality and not just in photo form
Made me feel them as pasrt of my own skeletal structure,
What I was born with….
Science is being opened eyed
to the hardly noticed obviousness of things---
listening and watching to the
the sky-pond of meanings
the lakes, forest, starry ocean currents of lives,
species grown
from stone and sea and sunny black obsidian
and a firey gash of molten rock in volcanic ash.
The planet breathes red tides and hurricanes,
snow caps and mustard seasons
the migrations of millions of birds every fall.
We study plants or stars
to learn to live with ourselves
star charting our own blood,
speaking like pollen to the wind.
To really know our world
means to know that my heart
is the wind that water chimes in my mind,
my eyes come from mountains,
your lungs breathe ages
and our bones are dinosaur relations.
The more you let earth into your mind
the more the heart
undoes the lust to kill to conquer and to eat meat.
Seeing through the eyes of other beings
creates the desire to coexist
not just with those you love,
but with Lampreys, Manta Rays, huge Beetles
Deer Fly, dangerous Bears and a sea that can kill you.
I am pine needles, falling acorns, mangoes,
the flatworm in the muddy water.
I am cloud, dirt, wave crashing,
the hydras arms, reaching for more life.
How did I come to be, Oak tree?
Even when my parched old body is dying
let me remember
I was born with butterflies.
I come from where dew comes from.
Butterflies land on my face in the morning and drink dew.
I am geyser ice and a lava liana.
Let these flowers of understanding breathe sun rising
on the miracle of the human mind
trying to love and see the earth in the same vision,
all at once,
living the life of whales traveling up the coast
and Curlew’s crying in the mudflats and minnows
in the eddies of a summer stream
and how mice feelingly seek with whiskers in the dark
and how the mind of a child creates a new phrase
never used before by anybody.
What a marvelous world to be born into
how the eyes of a baby Pronghorns
trust its parents in the Nevada expanse
so many babies, I think of them all---
Rhinos, Gorillas or Horses, kittens and my own child.
Now I am old enough to often be weary
I miss my young days when I could fly
and run for hours without fatigue.!
The Rooster at dawn crows the happiness
of the living earth spinning around once again.
Saturn floats in the infinity of space
like a duck waking up on the midnight waters

 

Ode to Science (part 1)
(Ode to our lone Earth)

I don’t mean math exactly,
I mean what comes before numbers
for instance, in the way the reflections
on the inside of a bubble
made by a little kid on the street corner
hints the landscape of the global earth,
or how cells divide an unzipped twist of spiral helix
or the geometries of quartz or spectrums of opals
or planets turning lonely in their regular orbits,
are the living stones that  distantly caused
 what makes like porpoises leap from water
migrating in paths no scientist understands yet
or how waves arrive on the beach
falling forward in backward reclusion,
or
what precedes numbers as I look at
raindrop diamonds
hanging in the geometry of spider webs,
or how the topology of honey combs
suggests the logistics of how bees dance
distances to flower’s pollen
--stamens arranged under palace gates
to deposit golden sperm
on the bees hairs.
Oh, what ordered chaos coils in Jupiter’s stormy Red Spot ?

Not numbers, exactly, but what moves and is,
between the edges of living and nonliving.
How you and I came forth from bacteria,
mycelium of fungi,
water dripping, sun on hot soil steaming
developing at long last into
how otters roll coiled in each other’s arms.
I mean sweat in the terrarium,
fiddlehead ferns uncurling,
and green algae on ponds
or chloroplasts and stomata
on the surface of sun soaked leaves.
I mean science without cocky, corporate business suits---
I mean real inquiry, without science done to serve power
without university junk science
done to suit hunters and corporate profiteers,
I mean the colored dust of butterfly wings
bright as aurora borealis, curtains of light
spreading like a multicolored tree across the night sky.
I see dendrite capillaries under the skin of my nose,
dendrites in brain cells, tree branches
and wetlands branching out the Mississippi Delta
I mean,
the same wet passion that holds your flesh to my desire
----the something that pulls tides into tide pools
----the light inside sea anemone’s tentacles
barnacles clutching liver colored sea stack rocks
the eyes of sea lions watching,
the clear lens of the life living
between science, sex and wonder.
 I measure meaning by bird sounds
singing crystals in the evening air:
20 Varied Thrushes singing up in the redwoods,
each with a slightly different note
glass-harp bowls making tones
between music and math
miracles of physical fact
between sound and motion.
Study the sun, study and think about it,
how sunspots dance in flames,
how it radiates our lives,
how this fragile membrane of life is all we have----
Crickets tell the temperature of firefly midnight.
I mean science is not just a method
but a receptivity
a way to listen and smell with eyes
or taste with fingers.
I came forth from the womb and am still trying
to figure out why I have five fingers
and what is the meaning of having eyes.
Even duck billed platypuses have bilateral symmetry.
They have eyes in their mouth
and can see feelingly in the dark.
Imagine seeing with your taste buds.

I watch the lonely truth of starlight
the lonely beat of my own heart
knowing my life is limited and short,
but in the time that is left
the reality of life, earth, this--- this,
this is all that matters:--- to update Blake
”to see galaxies in a grain of sand
and the fragile loss of time in a flower;
to see
how salmon colored sea stars cling to wet mussels   
where whales spout mist over the aboriginal sea.
O, these African dreams I keep having of when my ancestors
were dark skinned persons of the Congo,
following elephant trails through the rain forest
stepping over the fertile Elephant pies
back before human genes
began Migration towards the drawings
of Bears and Rhinos in Chauvet Cave.
Let a science of sympathy blossom now.
I slouch toward no Bethlehem,
but lean slowly towards marmots and ground squirrels
and look for alligator lizards on the back roads
15 years since religion fell out of the sphere of credibility.
how wonderful that science, my first love, came back to embrace me
and still holds my trusting hand,
like a child’s hand
feels like a chrysanthemum in my hand.
Her entire hand holds just one of my fingers.
That smallness is everything.

late autumn, 06

 

 

"Somehow I feel the globe itself, swift, swimming in space."  To a Sunset Breeze  dec. 1890, Whitman,