In Praise of Knowing

Who knows where the wind blows?
Parachute spiders gauge it with filaments;
we have weather stations that measure
speed and direction. The doldrums
are mapped, the westerlies, the jet stream,
and these are useful—for navigation,
for predicting the future. You can
predict the future. It’s not magic.
Just follow the patterns and you’ll know.
This is a poem in praise of knowing,
which is to say science. Those spiders know
when it’s time to go, cast their triangle nets
on the air, even if the journey is perilous,
because staying is worse.

Remember Fukushima? I think of it
sometimes like a pot on the back burner
in a dreamt house—unreal like that.
Last I heard, it was boiling over.
In my mind, it became bottomless—
half lies and half-lives
a Zeno’s paradox of never clean.
But I found out (because you can find out)
that the spill stopped spilling,
the damage done, irreversible, but finite.
Even tsunamis end. Everything ends.
This is a poem in praise of science,

which is to say Cassandra vision.
Who wants to hear the bad news?
Your house is on fire. No one wants that
to be true. But assuming your house
is on fire (because it is), when do you
want to find out? Which is to say how?
Because you will find out, one way
or another. For some time now
our blue planet has been hotting up.
The dream house is that pot on the stove
and we’re frogs in it, cooking slowly.
We know this, but forget. We know,
but don’t jump out. We know,
but don’t know. Who knows, we say,
who knows? This is a poem
in praise of finding out.

The trees have been keeping records.
Their rings show the rise and fall
in temperatures. Rise and fall,
rise and fall, rise and rise. And rise…
The earth itself is a sedimentary ledger,
uncookable book of corals, pollen fossils,
oxygen isotopes whose presence tells
the hot and cold, hot and cold,
hot and hot. And hot… So we know
what normal is, and this is not.

Remember the parachute spiders
hitching a ride on the wind? Turns out
the wind is only half the story, the liftoff
caused by electrostatic repulsion,
the way a charged balloon gloms
to the wall. In a windless box
these spiders have been observed
reaching for their opposite charge.
What is opposing you?
You never know until you find out.
So when do you want to know?
This is a poem in praise of knowing.

There is a saying here on Earth:
The best time to plant a tree
was 20 years ago; 30 years ago
that fellow Hansen from NASA told us
we were headed for this climate crisis.
The second best time to believe it is now.