The golden whales of California, and other rhymes in the American language

Chapter 33: ANOTHER WORD ON THE SCIENTIFIC ASPIRATION

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About This Book

The collection gathers lyrical and narrative poems that range from long, scene-setting pieces celebrating California's landscapes and the new art of the moving picture to playful rhymed scenarios and verse games. It interleaves meditations on history, myth, science, and religion with comic sketches and dialectal songs, moves into wartime reflections and elegies for fallen poets, and closes with local, Midwestern vignettes and personal tributes. The poet shifts between high-lyric description, satirical invective, and vernacular rhythms, experimenting with form and voice to present an uneven but energetic portrait of American life, technology, and regional identity in early twentieth-century verse.

ANOTHER WORD ON THE SCIENTIFIC ASPIRATION

“There’s machinery in the butterfly.

There’s a mainspring to the bee.

There’s hydraulics to a daisy

And contraptions to a tree.

“If we could see the birdie

That makes the chirping sound

With psycho-analytic eyes,

And x ray, scientific eyes,

We could see the wheels go round.”

And I hope all men

Who think like this

Will soon lie

Underground.