​Miracle Boy, Revived 


Let’s say it was grace that hooked the boy’s soul 
when it tried washing out to sea like a scrap of shirt 

in a strong current, away from the crux of tree 
that caught him, away from his tangled body cooling 

in the rush of an icy stream. Was it science
in the service of grace that gave doctors 

the wherewithal to warm him slowly, that gave 
nurses the patience to pump his chest for better 

than an hour? A miracle, they say. Then what are we 
to make of the way ions in impure water conduct 

a charge? A car crashed in a rainstorm where downed 
power lines electrified standing puddles. Science 

warns the woman should not have run to the car, 
should not have trembled with the charge 

of forty thousand volts. Where is mercy 
in thermodynamics when another woman 

touched the one stricken and also died, when 
two hearts shocked are as likely to cease beating 

as to beat precisely because of shock? Children 
released balloons in memory of the women, 

who only wanted to help. Archimedes’ principle 
says the balloons will stop rising once 

their density matches the surrounding air, 
well before they ever reach heaven. 





The Science of Poetry the Poetry of Science


Quantum theory posits parallel worlds 
we sometimes press against 
where we make different choices 
and interact with our mirror selves, 
and sometimes we say How weird. 
I feel as if I’ve done this before. Numbers 
tell physicists all possible histories 
and futures are real, so the British 
did win the Revolution; we did not go 
to the museum to see human forms 
cast by the ash of a Vesuvius 
never erupted; my pregnancies did not 
end in miscarriage. To think math 
can have such imagination, but our own 
Frost proffered the Many Interacting Worlds 
hypothesis before theorists. He took 
the road less travelled, as you know, 
but he also took the road well-worn. 
Across the membrane, his son did not 
die of cholera; his other son 
did not commit suicide; his daughter 
did not die in labor, his other 
daughter survived her birth. His wife 
was a cancer survivor. He knew the world 
will end in fire and ice, that all ends 
suffice, and the science agrees. In all multiple 
macrocosms we have promises to keep 
and miles to go before we sleep 
and miles to go before we sleep…





Snapshots of Pluto from New Horizons


The images come back
and our minds make a heart

of the variegated terrain, 
the shape proffered with light, 

as if we always default 
to optimism even when we 

append “dwarf” and take away 
citizenship. Pluto teaches us

a lesson about modifiers,
how they sometimes count

us out. Add autistic to boy
and he spins around his class, 

orbiting but never of the system. 
Migrant to worker means 

existence on the edges of
our landscape, black to woman 

means being eclipsed by 
gaseous giants. On the outside 

we submit our love letters 
anyway, only wanting to be 

adored. You get the picture: 
NASA makes the most 

of contrast so Charon squats 
in the shadows and Pluto’s 

big heart leaks like 
a torn sand-bag. 



​

Fukushima Daisies


Half-folded, a cell 
half-divided, the center 
puckers like lips, 

and the white petals 
gather like a headdress 
on one end, the yellow 

not a fleece button, 
the petals not a symmetry 
of rays. Fasciation 

is something gone awry 
in replication, set apart 
from those perfect 

blossoms as alike as 
school children in tidy 
uniforms, yet some 

of us see the novel 
in what went wrong, some 
of us see our one-off

children in those radio-
active flowers, clustered 
into misfit bouquets.