Does a leaf note change, sense acceleration, feel heat?
Before they fall. Aftermath?
To soak, bristle, crumble.
Homing on gravity.
Theory is easy for some.
2024: The hottest year on planet Earth in the last 125,000 years.
2024: The Universe is expanding faster than “previously” thought.
What were we thinking? The speed of light more or less?
Perhaps The Universe knows something we do not.
We the 8.2 Billion: Gesturing in an Abstract Reality.
In an hour-glass life-span how can one know?
8.2 Billion we humans, this blue-green tide-pool Earth.
Verbs run amok: Tackle, combat, battle. Nouns to fight abstract reality: Drought, Climate, Heat. Wildfire, Flood, Eruption.
Honing response to a savior edge.
Task: Image possibility within disjunction.
Between don't gaze ahead admonishment.
Among don't zero-in close astonishment.
While riding acceleration in don't look back obedience.
Task: Grasp tangentials. Occupy interstices. Qualify conclusions. Image when our wavering invention — the ancient soundings known as Words — betray.
Task: Image the global situation, temporal duration, a scale of immediate now-time. Then, how to imagine 8.2 Billion desiring humans in their each and every moment?
As gesture. As phantom. As fragment. As ambiguity. As absence.
As leaf.
That's how.
A wider range of words exist to describe effects of cold than heat.
— Karen Solie from her poem Orion, London Review of Books, Dec2024