AQUATELOS A Thesis Presented to the Faculty ... - Cornell University

vii. This Mass
It is too much, Mr Howard, to ask for a “methodical nomenclature, applicable
to the various forms of suspended water.” We know
“they are subject to certain distinct modifications, produced by the general
causes
which effect all the variations of the atmosphere: they are commonly as good
visible
indications of the operation of these causes, as is the countenance of the state
of a person’s mind or body.” But to speak of knowledge means already
to loose an unbroken colt, quick, playful, an energy incarnated, but it plays
amnesiac, alone, honed to wariness, itself knowing nothing, the one animal in
a gaping
valley. It is second childishness. Bridle it, it will turn on you, snap your neck.
So lay by methodical, ginger with that nomenclature. We know our cloudiness.
Our time is spent with nephometers, training their slender probes on one
another,
scanning for the rents where some light could slip through
without warning. We are most charmed by dandelions about to dissolve.
Your love for these mutable species burns through interlaid ages
like white phosphorous, whose present employment you could surely
not imagin. Your love cohered, only perhaps to your later
knowledge, from the ultrachromatic skies of two volcanoes, as a star
emerges from indescribably tall columns of primal gas, out there
in the perfect, speechless violence of cosmos. So too our loves suffer
from a flawed hypsometry. We are never far from the deeps, never
far from we. Did you envy the clouds, white hanks shredding into long licks
fading, rosing up from below, underblush announcing evening’s
promising return? Rib racks stretching for miles, beaches, puffed flanks,
pirouettes of lesser ganglia close to treeline, creeks of gray honey—
How seemingly desireless, insensate. Toothless, eyeless. An embodiment
of the unattainable middle path. But what do we know—
denominators have not fared well with the holy. Clouds seem driven
equally
towards one impenetrable body spread around the world, a final nest
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