Geodesy

"As Earth spins, its shape is slightly flattened into an ellipsoid, so that there is a greater distance between the centre of Earth and the surface at the equator, than the centre of Earth and the surface at the poles. This bigger distance, coupled with the rotation of Earth, results in the force of gravity being weaker at the equator than at the poles."

The shape of the world: pushed down
by its spin, “a flattened ellipsoid.” As if
a potter’s wet hands, while centering clay
on the wheel, let the rotation take over,
as if they stepped away to get a fresh cup
of tea, as if the spinning clay gathered a
wisp of the earth’s magnetic field to itself—
a cloud condensing, a blanket against the
solar wind—and made an atmosphere.
As if the potter returned as a goddess, a
geologist or mathematician, the maker re-
making, remade by the shape of the world.

Eschatology

Takeuchi Seihō, Spring Snow (Shunsetsu), 1942

The crow with a broken primary feather limping
up the drive, angling for a cheese cracker. Or the
neighbor’s fat chickens, bringing death to grubs.
A week ago, two puddles of thickening blood on
the porch; later, while weeding, I saw a sack, no,
the pink hairless remains of a rat, under lavender.
I’m tangled up in other people’s stories about the
end of things. They’re frayed, threadbare stories,
having no crow, no chickens, no grubs, no rat, yet
they nettle me. Lilliputian thread, cobwebs from a
dead god’s crypt; I shudder as they brush my face.

Ribes

"Artemis of Ephesus." Statue from the Amphitheater
of Lepcis Magna, photograph by Marco Prins.

In early spring, the white flowering currant. Artemis Ephesia,
egg-breasted Lady pale as the moon, as the marble under
your lost paint, when bud-break came, did your followers
sit at your feet, drowsy as bees in torpor? I lean close, bend
towards the pendant blossoms. Couldn’t be indecorum in this
wet land, it’s the same sweet scent as blood-red sanguineum.