A Monday Morning Poem for You

In which love is given a chance to speak.

I’ve been noticing a struggle within me as I seek to cover climate science from a biological perspective, a certain chill developing around my chest as I wade through graphs and data and scientific verbiage. Something is missing, and that missing thing has something to do with love.

What?! Science is meant to be objective. The discipline of objectivity allows us to trust our results and avoid human bias. Well, yes. Objectivity is important. In the best-case scenario it allows nature to speak for itself, with us, as creators and consumers of science, transcribing its “spoken” truth. Yet I question whether one can fully know anything in a purely objective manner. Imagine trying to know a friend simply by collecting data on them.

This also brings up the question of intuiting. Intuition isn’t granted much scientific credence, but I am beginning to think it should. One way to think about intuition is as the ability to assess situations too complex for rational means of understanding. There is perhaps nothing on Earth as complex as it’s climate system, which involves all living and physical phenomenon, in enormously complex pathways and feedbacks. Shouldn’t intuition play a role in formulating the questions we ask and the structing of scientific research. And doesn’t intuition lean heavily on love, the direct and uninhibited appreciation of some one or some thing?

I’ll be writing more about this in future. In the meantime, here is a poem in which love gets the mic.

Sitting with my dog amongst the beach litter
as a returning tide slides in.
His nose lifts, little gasps of the nostrils
as he tastes and threads the scent trails.
his body lightly shaking
     with each staggered inbreath.

Me, human and ocular, pan side to side:
water-diamonds, heron pose, cloud boil
driftwood eroded down to howls.
A small shell cups a pinch of sea drift
not yet taken by wind.

I can cup my ears
      but not my eyes
and make do with squinting.
Blue continents of light
between the cloud white, widgeons
     angling down, rafting up in the deeper water.

Love is a word poorly defined
     and often misapplied
but above me the snow geese cry
     urging on their own drifting lines
and I feel something like a tide
begin to rise inside me
welling up through my chest 
      my throat
pressing behind my eyes
as I watch them cross the sky.

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