My morning was all thunderstorm and flooded streets as I splashed from errand to errand. Despite the miserable conditions, I finished my to-do list, then spent the afternoon pretending to be a cat.
Author: Rae Spencer
Luminiferous Ether
Luminiferous Ether
They imagined a substance
Something made and measurable
That transmitted light
Bore the spectrum from shore
To shore, from planet to planet
Star to star they embraced
Aristotle’s ether, confounded
By the idea of waves
Crossing a sea of nothing
To a boundary that moves
Receding edge of confidence
Calculated into stability
Into constancy, a cosmological
Solution to infinity, dark shadow
Of mass ungrasped, cast across
Galactic coordinates and mapped
Against math, logic to simplify
The special fields of time and space
Elegant descriptions of the refuted
Ether, the vacuum tension condensed
Intelligible, static notation collapsing
Observation and paradox
Particulate light and magnetic
Matter graphed into balance
The observable universe illuminated
By luminous equations
Cicada Molt
I wonder what it feels like to wake up with wings?
Notes from the Yard
The yard isn’t exactly bustling, in this heat, but there are signs of life. Each day, more and more cicadas molt on the fence.
The young praying mantises have spread out into the iris beds.
And I’m still seeing pondhawks, though their numbers have decreased over the last two days.
Finally, I’m intrigued by this cocoon. What’s in there? My chances of finding out are slim, because it will likely emerge when I’m busy doing other things. Even so, I check on it several times a day. Just in case…
More from Red Wing Park (and a Publication Note)
Red Wing Park is one of my favorite places to visit when I crave a short walk. Or when I’m in the mood for butterflies. Yesterday, I discovered several new attractions, including lotus blooms in an artificial pond and a skink basking on the pond’s rock border.
Butterflies were out in droves, even a few species I have never seen before. (Add these to the Snowberry Clearwing Moths in yesterday’s post…)
I caught several images of a large, unfamiliar swallowtail. I can’t tell if these are Pipevine Swallowtails or Spicebush Swallowtails. Maybe both species were present? Any ideas?
One individual had a mangled hindwing, with more than half of the wing amputated. In marked contrast to the other butterflies, this one struggled in flight. It flailed and fluttered along in short spurts, stopping to perch on flowers rather than hovering as it drank. It continued to feed and flirt with its companions, but it was decidedly less agile.
As far as wing injuries go, this was as bad as I’ve seen. I felt an uncomfortable surge of empathy, and I couldn’t help but wonder if the wound was painful. The encounter has turned me philosophical.
It’s just a butterfly. An insect. An ephemeral creature, at best. And yet, its fate affected me. I am reminded of that jaded cliche about chaos theory, the one where a butterfly flaps its wings in one part of the world, causing an alteration in the weather pattern of another part of the world. What of this butterfly’s damaged wing? What currents of change might eddy in its wake?
Publication note: My poem “The Road” was published at vox poetica this week. It is now posted on the poemblog. Many thanks to editor Annmarie Lockhart!
Rae Spencer 