Science, Science Fiction and Poetry
Autumn 1993
True North/1: The Lover Wishes to Be of Unending
secret service to the beloved. When the beloved is God, this is hard; except for the atheist. A magnetic compass, even without interference from nearby masses of iron—the steel frame […]
Science, Science Fiction and Poetry
Autumn 1993
True North/3: It’s Hard
The noontime shadow changes length very slowly. The noontime shadow is only one length: its length at noon. The noontime shadow—my clock is usually off anyway; it’s hard. It mean […]
Science, Science Fiction and Poetry
Autumn 1993
True North/2: Our Home the Earth
For help from the spinning earth, you need a stick driven into the ground. Turning, the earth makes the Sun appear to rise and cross the sky—and set in the […]
Science, Science Fiction and Poetry
Autumn 1993
True North/4: Strategem-Strategem
You can measure more easily when the shadow length changes more rapidly: morning, afternoon. Take a rope. Tying yourself to your fixed stick—don’t bend it—and pulling the rope taut, walk […]
Science, Science Fiction and Poetry
Autumn 1993
True North/5: It’s Easy
at the South Pole. There every direction is true North. Direction there itself the point, turning and moving —or the place where your eyes fall, if you stand waiting. Though […]
Poetry
Summer 1991
Milk in Glass Bottles
Upright, not incurving bottles, bottles with cream on the crimped silver cap: what my mother foundin the milkbox, built by my dad. What my mother, then, when someone came, was […]
Poetry
Winter 1995
Young Willard Gibbs Is a Physicist
at home, in the home at High and Wall he never left, his emotional life “not fought for,” Muriel said— Rukeyser, who fought for his biography. Self-appointed. Against her, cohorts […]
Poetry
Winter 1995
Striving All My Life
Maxwell said, There is no more powerful way to introduce knowledge to the mind than . . . as many different ways as we can, wrenching the mind away from […]