The doggone river slips by me
But whispers all of her secrets in a foreign tongue
I’ve translated from the dictionaries and listen to the words
I look at our numbers and our drawings and the sum
Does not equal my sense of magnitude of the secrets that she carries in her tongue.
Are we limited by science and these numbers and these words?
Is the answer plain to see in the stones and in the birds?
I support your efforts to quantify the fish
And it might be true that incremental expansion of our minds
Will lead us to the answer of a question we designed
But it seems worth thinking about the things that we will miss
By designing questions to which science can be applied.
What will be the next frontier of integrated thought?
Does Larry know the answer with a yin-yang on his hat?
If the things we know are a series, does it converge upon one thing
Or does it expand forever and leave the people puzzling
Over the quality of our questions and what the river sings.
Now I’m back at home, drifting off to sleep.
Six new dimensions of comprehension exist within my mind
And through struggling with numbers and maps and many words
The tables turn on my sense that we cannot ever find
A meaning to the mystery and chaos of the field.
I’m piecing together stories
of how the folds
in mother earth’s body
changed from a rainstorm a few geologic seconds ago.
That the numbers and the maps and my intuition all agree
On a story we can tell folks about the Tuolumne
Fills me back up with confidence for the institution of scientific thought
As a means of understanding nature and its ways
so I intentionally stop the filling before it reaches the top.