Scientific American - USA (2020-08)

22 Scientific American, August 2020

METER
Edited by Dava Sobel

Jessica Reed, who studied physics at Purdue University, is author of

the collection World, Composed (Finishing Line Press, 2018). She has

taught science poetry courses in Beijing and Saudi Arabia, as well as in

the U.S., most recently at Butler University near her home in Indiana.

LIGO, CALTECH, M.I.T.

AND

AURORE SIMONNET

Sonoma State University

As the Knud Rasmussen

Glacier Calves,

a Woman Translates

“Gravitational Waves”

into Blackfoot

When we first detect the chirp of black holes colliding,

she renders the press release into disappearing language:

“Light splitter and union of instruments” (speak, interferometer )

“Self-strengthened lights exploding” (speak, gamma rays ).

Such subtle “bird songs” are undone by gravitational waves,

we are compelled to fix their fugitive features.

In glaciers, nature deviates and also runs its course—

its layers not quite memory, but more like artifice:

snow’s structure, changed under so much weight

the geometry of flakes collapses, heavy cold

compressing air, deforming firn.

The cold is a formalist: it constructs a made thing, temporary,

describing ancient climate feedbacks as it melts.

How elusive the object, how we read impermanence in layers

of ice so compressed

its expansion can shatter glass

of ice so deep you can no longer discern sequence,

its layers folding and sliding into the nonlinear,

as effortful as astrophysics in Siksika,

somehow still legible.

We must consider and reconsider

freezing and thawing,

a girl punished for speaking in her native tongue,

the defiance in resurrecting an idea whose circumference

swells and contracts, an artifact of water and sky,

revealing the dual meanings of sublime —

its magnificence, its vaporizing solidity—

which, I say, is proof of something, if it doesn’t save us.

AUTHOR’S NOTE: Astrophysicist Corey Gray, a member of the

Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO),

asked his mother, Sharon Yellowfly, to translate the LIGO press

release on the detection of gravitational waves into Blackfoot.

© 2020 Scientific American