Stephen Mead

The Poetry of Science


I inspire myself.
The initiative is implanted
just as we respire a sky
no one touches, but can feel.
Look, here's our gestures:
Instantaneous, right on.
They last mild as sun
playing among drapes.
Even my cats recognize such proof
and do not analyze what they acknowledge.
At first they meditate like Buddhas,
profoundly curled around purrs.
Then, as lunatics, they scamper,
moving when the mood
strikes —
serenity frenetic.
Yesterday I found four more
dwelling at the bottom of an old milk urn.
They drowsed like fish in the reddened depths
of flaking metal. Dreaming belly upward,
as squint-lidded as moles, they exhaled
light as shimmer, some visible sound.
Does any lesson lie in those continuous notes?
Now I'm a sky cloud, a spiritual house
moving up. To become a yellow shaft
amid windows, a diaphanous slip, is
to be a product of the wind
steering landscapes.
Then we are all litmus, merely:
cells, poems, instrumentals ignorant
of the process which really
makes will.