cattle egret
Spectra of the vortex
A wistfulness
In memory of David Peck Todd, the astronomer who almost but not quite discovered the moons of Mars.
Thy firmness makes my circle just
Namers of clouds
When “here” means “within brick,” we can know what “died” means. But in the light around the clouds that Luke Howard looked up to learn, there is no such thing as the no longer changing.
Variation on a theme by Henry David Thoreau
Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars.
That sing, and singing in their glory move
Zoology of the spectrum
Antithesis: wings having opened in the azure, it is no longer barren.
The thesis, below, is from the Poems of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman (1821-1873). This meditation on the meaning of nature was first published in 1860 — that is, in the era of In Memoriam and a year after The Origin of Species — but in its time it went almost unread. Tuckerman’s brother Edward (1817-1886) taught botany at Amherst College and his wife was one of Emily Dickinson’s correspondents, but there is no evidence that Dickinson knew of Frederick or his work.
Pan-European congress of intellectuals, Zauberberg 1910
Tread lightly
