Art is science, science is art

Collaboration and cooperation are more than buzzwords here in Virginia's Blue Ridge. Among the many colleague organizations with whom we are proud to partner, The Science Museum of Western Virginia is one. Several of our apprentice artists joined Amy and me for their final "Butterflies @ 5" presentation of the season in late September. The following poem was inspired by the few minutes I spent gawking at the moon rock the museum had on display.

At the Science Museum of Western Virginia

This like a dream | Keeps other time, | And daytime is | The loss of this
(from “This Lunar Beauty,” W. H. Auden)

The crystal shivers through
your impossibly old body,
moon-rock, lunar idol,
fascination block on view
here beneath the butterfly
pavilion. I quiver,
circling the pedestal
supporting your extra-
terrestrial mass, which
I expect, any nanosecond
now, to break out, shatter
glass, and streak free
across a room that can’t
possibly cage 33 million millennia.

(September 2013)

No less a scientific genius than Thomas Edison
wrote to the operatic genius, Giacomo Puccini:

"Men die and governments change,
but the melodies of La Boheme will live forever."

(Mark Fisher:
Sounds of an Atlantic Spotted Dolphin)