Happy Halloween

BOO.

Anyone? Anyone? Anybody out there?

Today I took 6,395,329 pounds of books to the used book store. The idea was to sell them and walk out with more money and fewer books than I walked in with. Rather, I walked out with the same amount of books I walked in with, minus $64.

I am working on a research paper about poetry written about science. I’m learning that there isn’t much of it out there. I got a book called “Verse and Universe: Poems about Science and Mathematics.” Other than that, I’m not finding much poetry about science (for adults—there are some kid’s science education books). Can any of you recommend anything? Specifically about the Universe/Space or about the opposite: Cells, microscopic stuff. They don’t need to be whole books about it—a single poem here and there will do. Anyone?


"It hit the news today: the telescopic evidence,
faint light from cosmic gas, traces of the stuff
that held everything at once--my fingernail, this pen...
my mother's hairnets, the plane that crashed in Dallas yesterday...
the cameo that vanished under my bed when I was ten, mountains
of bleashed conch shells, women washing sheets
in the Ganges... cobbled streets
of Paris, craters on the moon, spaceships not invented yet
and cameras clicking pictures of that cosmic dust
colder than the pain of loss--proving that everything came
from the same infintesimal seed
about the size, they say, of the dot at the end of this sentence."

--Dinah Berland, All Together, Nothing Lost

In which the artist bangs her head on her desk, stops to yawn, and resumes.

When I dragged myself
to my cubicle this morning
It was like I had never left. I can’t escape
To a coffee shop
Or—novel idea—the gym
Because I have to leave on time again
to go to class and I
I’m going nuts
It is 2:30. The day is young.

My rhododendron weeps for me.
The printer whines.
If my cube had iron bars
I’d drag a tin can along them.
If my cube had iron bars
I’d hold them in my fists
Shake and do something obscene,
like a monkey at the zoo who belongs
in a tree, in a forest, in a country, far, far
away from here.

Where will untellable stories be told?

“We would learn to hear the blankness / that forms the essence of our going on”
--McPherson

On the lawn at 1 a.m. they grow
closer together, strangers in robes
and party skirts and flannels they come
from watching television, making routine love
the bar, couches where they dozed, they come
from doorways and alleys
from the gun shot, the sirens, or the
rustling of voices they have come
together now, from the corners, with nothing
at all to say.
A boy is dead. They all know that
The many questions have no answers
no use asking
but there is comfort
in standing near, the drawing in like ducks on a pond,
an unlikely group, silent, as if to say I
am not alone I am not alone right now these
are my companions
in this they shift their weight cross
and uncross their arms then one girl, maybe twenty, says
It is late.
They separate, the miserable thread of the night growing long and tangled
between them.