“Dark Oceans on Icy Worlds”
for Tim

After days of clouds and spring rain,
sun pours through the dining room windows,
fills the translucent bowls of creamy porcelain
teacups—empty and clean–rimmed with gold,
stacked askew on their tray like whirling orbits.

In the garden, one daffodil, a double-bloom
of peach and white, shakes its complicated folds
in as many directions as the wind
dictates, its whorls of petals predetermined,
like the swirling of galaxies, in patterns

noted by Fibonaci. (We count more easily,
apparently, because he also authored Liber Abaci
and championed numerals then called Hindu-Arabic
or modus Indorum.) Inspired by early travels,
this mathematical Leonardo used what he’d seen

in his youth to make his father’s mercantile
woes ease, and meanwhile re-energized
medieval thought about the Golden Mean.
Now, seeing a headline from my husband’s magazine,
Sky & Telescope, I wonder what it means

that I can travel simultaneously,
leaping past what numbers delineate,
(but respectfully, mindfully)
into speculative realms of astrobiology;
and thoughts of moon jellies at Monterey;

and of the wonder, in their tiny mock-sea,
of golden jellyfish who follow the sun daily
across their Palauan lake, like aquatic
sunflowers, turning away
from what is cold, or merely shadowy.

Leslie Schultz

Leslie Schultz

Until Tomorrow!