Nick Politan works as a wine merchant in Brooklyn. Previous work has appeared in Blazing Stadium, The Babel Tower Notice Board, Figure 1, Sylvia and Landfill, among others. Here, he shares a poem on Earthly boundaries and fluctuations
The top of the world
Presents a basin,
In space, there is
No more cardinal
Direction; here, however,
There is. Haply change,
An eye toward microscopic
Electrics, capable of every
Thing you’ll see. Thermokarst
Lakes panorama the mind
With landscape implications,
No telling what methane bubbles
Below, the permanent,
Frosting ground – if not
Ice, what describes
Our planet? Its propensity
& flow, for loops
Of indifference that follow
Simple aggregates
Of pressure, charge, temperature
Over time, the nearly algorithmic
Beauty of erosion, the Lena Pillars,
The brown-splotched-
Albedo Effected-scrub
Heat of modern boreal
Life: that they are named
Cloudberries of all things,
That snow becomes
A heat blanket for what
Must otherwise stay
Maddeningly cold.
Seas change without notice, global
Currents author a palimpsest
Of how much remains un-understood.
Fathom the fathoms,
How deeply layered we must go,
Remarking wells in which to
Pour curiosity borne by the grim
Impulse, its reminder: the mean free
Path of idle time dies us, effectively bored.
The oceans boil to air
& living is returned to the rock.
