JMD in slo-mo at Open Gym
Introducing a CFSBK Poet: Jynne Dilling Martin
Last year, CFSBKer and poet Jynne Dilling Martin spent six weeks, funded by the National Science Foundation, living in Antarctica. As her NPR interview reports, “She spent the summer (winter, to those of us in the Northern Hemisphere) shadowing scientists as they went about their work, and writing about the people who call the icy continent home.” Out of that project emerged many of the poems in her new collection, We Mammals In Hospitable Times, one of which is included below.
Jynne will be giving a reading at Book Court on Wednesday, February 25, at 7pm, and she would love for any and all CFSBKers to join her. She also kept a blog while she was in Antarctica, which you can find here.
From Jynne, as an introduction for the poem below: “One of my favorite things poetry can do, like no other art form, is knit together disparate images, from all different times, places, sources. In this particular poem, I used quotes from an actual love letter that was found last year in a Korean tomb alongside details of the scientific work I witnessed in Antarctica. Most people imagine Antarctica being all white, but in fact, it’s spectacularly colorful—the ice refracts the sunlight into a constant dazzling rainbow mirage—and colored light also glows out of many of the scientific machines, like the ones measuring neutrinos that have fallen all the way to Earth from other galaxies. It stuns me to think we can actually see and touch light, or love letters, from such different places and times.”
EVERYTHING WE CAN SEE IN THE UNIVERSE GLOWS
A giant ice cube at South Pole Station captures
extragalactic neutrinos. Please take me to where you are,
pleaded the pregnant Korean widow to her lost love
in a sixteenth-century letter an archaeologist
found folded in a tomb. Telescopes see only light;
faces from our dreams, unspoken desires, dead stars
go undetected. Come to me secretly and show yourself
she whispered. Hans Spemann plucked a fine hair
from his newborn daughter to tie an embryo egg in half.
The microscope zooms in on a freshly formed eyeball
gazing expectantly back. The archaeologist feels ill,
presses twice-boiled tea leaves to his forehead,
unfolds and refolds the letter again. The fastest thing
in the universe is light; the slowest is forgiving
then forgetting. The seal gnaws a hole in the sea ice,
sunlight flashes on a million emerald cod flitting below.
Captured neutrinos flare pale blue; embryos float
in drops of glistening saline fluid and await their fate.
Quartz cuvettes filled with seawater and lavender dye
slide into a spectrometer, colors the human eye
cannot see fan out inside a box. Please, come in a dream,
there is no limit to what I want to know. I wait here.
From We Mammals in Hospitable Times by Jynne Dilling Martin. Copyright 2015 by Jynne Dilling Martin. Excerpted by permission of Carnegie Mellon University Press.
News and Notes
- The Snowshoe trip to the Catskills was rescheduled for this Saturday, and there are now two spaces left. Email Mare [at] CrossFitSouthBrooklyn.com if you’re interested!
- DON’T FORGET TO RSVP TO CLASS: Click on the Class Schedule and RSVP tab in the left-hand column (under General Information) and select the class for which you’d like to RSVP.
- Want to work out on Sunday at 9am and bring your kid/s? Now you can! Sign them up at the Front Desk for CFSBK Kids Club, and learn more here.
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