Poem for Tuesday and Binghamton Zoo

Sea of Stars
By Dick Jones

They will require,
should I return,
that I give name
to all the things I saw.

Even as I feed back
voltage, trickle chemistry
past their electrodes;
even as I share

my heartbeat with their monitors,
my blood with their microscopes,
they will question
in quiet voices,

seeking out new nouns
with which to corner
the ineffable, new verbs
to charge the immaterial.

As now their aerial voices —
filtered through ionosphere,
the shingle-clouds of asteroids,
across these tideless oceans —

whisper insubstantial, needle-thin,
scratching their need to know
the unknowable onto the mighty
silence. I trail interrogation

like a shower of sparks.
But from this eminence
I no longer heed
their eyes that scrutinize,

lidless, unswerving. This dark
accomodates a billion eyes, speculating
my parabola by day, by night, probing
for my tiny skidding light.

Implacable, incurious, I navigate
the brilliant wastes — long black
sargassos drifting, planet wrack
and flotsam, dereliction.

And beyond, always beyond,
the bright flying splinters of the stars.

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Apart from a brief trip to the food store with Paul in the late afternoon when we realized we had neither breakfast nor dinner foods in the house, I had a pretty quiet Monday. I had all the trip laundries to fold, so I put on One Day, which I was not expecting to be great but I was hoping I would like because it has Anne Hathaway, Jim Sturgess, and Rafe Spall, plus a few minutes of Romola Garai; I am sorry to report that the script was so bad that not even these actors whom I like could redeem it, in fact not even pretty shots of Britain and France could redeem it.

Adam had a busy day -- this week he has a calculus symposium in the mornings and cross country practice in the evenings, plus he went running and biking to the post office by himself in the early afternoon before walking the neighbor's dogs in the late afternoon. We had an electrician come in the afternoon to fix the light switch in our bedroom, which broke two weeks ago and we haven't been able to turn on the light ever since. I only saw four bunnies while walking today, but I saw the episode of Endeavour that we missed. Here are some photos from the Binghamton Zoo last week:


Leopard Siblings


Ring-Tailed Lemurs


Belgian Rabbits


Monk Parrots


Goats


Amur Tiger


Mouflon


Arctic Fox