Anne Tardos
Facts 1 (Space)
The fact that I am willing to open my mind to more subtle ideas of space, is hard
because my imagination is closely tied to my daily experience as a large animal.
There is also the image of the universe curving like a saddle.
This helps me recognize that events can occur in an indefinite causal order, where
both A causes B and B causes A, which can be simultaneously true.
From my perspective, space looks nice and smooth. From another’s perspective
space is fluctuating like crazy, bouncing around and ripping apart. In that case,
what does it even mean to say A is next to B?
Along comes a scientist and suggests that the world’s physical features have
sculpted our brains along the curved contours of the cosmos.
Facts 2
Future moon missions are named project Artemis, after the Greek goddess of the
moon, whose temple was one of the seven wonders of the world, with only a
single column still standing where the temple used to be, so while looking for
extant wonders, one can find the Chichén Itzá, a Toltec-style pyramid in the
Yucatan, one of the seven wonders where visitors climb up hundreds of very
steep steps and invariably find it daunting to descend, deeply regretting not
having traveled to Portugal instead, to see the Templo de Diana, thus returning to
Artemis, where her temple was built in the Greek style, a temple without any
steps to climb under the broiling Mexican sun.
Facts 3
Neither could I resist the image a marine biologist paints of the blue whale’s heart
that’s the size of a car, and typically only beats twice a minute when diving,
and that a human could easily swim through its aorta.
Assuming there is a human being swimming around there, the animal would have
to be dead. Or maybe anesthetized by a team of veterinary cardiologists,
who would be trying to work on the whale’s heart.
The zeptosecond, the shortest unit of time ever measured
a trillionth of a billionth of a second or
a decimal point followed by 21 zeroes and 1
is the time it takes for light to cross water
Facts 4
There is also the fact that the solar storm destroys numerous SpaceX satellites in
orbit that were launched in spite of repeated warnings from astronomers,
while an Italian woman is found mummified, sitting at her table, after having died
two years ago,
and the fact that chimps use gently crushed insects to put on wounds. They don’t
eat the bugs, only apply them to treat injuries,
while in Germany, in a valiant effort to inspire people to get vaccinated, 700
sheep and goats were arranged in the shape of a giant 330-foot syringe in a
field, just south of Hamburg, where shepherd Wiebke Schmidt laid out
pieces of bread in the shape of a syringe, which the ungulates gobbled up
once they were let out into the field.
Facts 5
I can imagine a frisbee is being tossed to a young dog who expertly retrieves it in
midair, while in the exact same moment,
a giant asteroid crashes into Jupiter’s top clouds after a two-year orbit around the
planet, just as
Charles W. Mills, a U.K.-born and Jamaica-raised philosopher whose life’s work
was the interrogation and critique of structural racism and the foundations
of liberalism, dies, just as
Florida’s famous dolphin, “Winter” dies of twisted intestines, while
muography, a technique used to peer inside nuclear reactors and Egyptian
pyramids, mapping the insides of hazardous volcanoes, while back in Egypt,
giant storms force deadly fat-tailed scorpions out into the open, stinging
hundreds, killing many.
Based in New York, Anne Tardos is the author of twelve books of poetry, including Andante (above/ground press, 2022), The Exploding Nothingness of Never Define (BlazeVOX, 2020), and The Camel’s Pedestal: Poems 2009-2017 (BlazeVox, 2017), and editor of three posthumous collections of poetry by Jackson Mac Low: The Complete Light Poems (Chax Press, 2015), 154 Forties (Counterpath Press, 2012) and Thing of Beauty: New and Selected Works (University of California Press, 2008). Her multilingual and multimedia works have been presented at numerous international sound poetry festivals.
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