What follows is a poem about the Voyager spacecraft I wrote a long time ago, when the world and I were very different than we are today. For a multisensory experience, you can read along while listening to a splendid set-to-space-noise version here.
The Last Word
The maple tree across the street is shivering. Just this morning, she’d stopped my breath with the red-gold flames of her leaves. Now I watch from the kitchen window as brutal gusts shred her gorgeous coat and dash the scraps to the ground. My eyes stay fixed on the bare tree while my mind cycles […]
My dad died last year at age 94, his death a blessing for him and, while immensely sad, a relief for me. My grief felt over too soon, but I realized it was because I’d been grieving him for years. I looked back thinking about those so-called stages of grief we learned about in Psych […]
Ed. note: It’s easy to believe that literally every single thing on this earth is broken, awful, and/or doomed. But it’s not true. Some things (not most, but some!) are good. Here are a few unexpected moments—and geese—that have comforted us, given us hope, or brightened a difficult day.
Near where I live in Seattle there is a rail trail called the Burke-Gilman. Everyone around here knows it simply as The Burke. An asphalt conduit that bisects north Seattle from Bothell to the Ballard Locks, The Burke is over twenty miles long, and a classic multiuse recreational urban route. Bicyclists fly over it, people […]
Brown Penguins are black and white—everyone knows this—except when they aren’t, like in April, at a place called Punta Tombo. Punta Tombo is a gnarled peninsula in southern Argentina that hosts a large colony of Magellanic penguins. Every September, more than two hundred thousand of them come here to breed. They pair up, lay a […]
For years, now, I’ve had a scrap of digital paper on my computer desktop with four words on it: Felicia, the Fermilab Ferret. A memorial to an extraordinary life. A reminder to channel the legendary little animal’s spirit into something strange and new. Little poems, perhaps. And, now, finally, I have. But first: her story. […]
Abstract Many years ago, some birds started breeding on an island. Several thousand of them still do. The world changes around them, but their basic needs have stayed the same. Will they be on the island much longer? We don’t know. We hope so. The signs are ambiguous. Keywords: Seabirds, oceans, uncertainty Introduction A good […]