| . . . Only the simplest of animals perceives the universe as it is. | |
| --Donald E. Carr; quoted in Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek |
Here, perception, through observation,
is the scientist's art, and knows its bound--
no sky. At least no sky is visible
from the basement in which he peers through
the microscope's window to an amoeba.
He adjusts his focus.
Limned by the lense, the amoeba--
fine specimen--it splits,
And his wife, unsettled in white sheets,
in a white room across town,
twisting fine hair around a puzzling finger.
She says, the air is leaving,
and she wants to keep
algae in the room for oxygen
because the room is small--
and she has seen it all.
(Funds are hard to come by,
these days go to splitting atoms.)
The funding they won't give him.
The algae they won't give her,
the simplicity of the amoeba
under distant glass, and the atoms
of an air that leaves--simpler still,
what do these see?--
or if they cannot see, imagine?--
unseen by him, or her,
who have imagined these themselves,
but from their own enclosures.
| (South Hadley, 1978; Gainesville, 1993, 1995; Hamburg, 2002; Tallahassee, 2009.) |
