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The Missouri Review

Poetry | August 19, 2021

Six Poems by Bruce Campell

Bruce Campell

I Hear the Continents Are Drifting Like Great Granite Pirates

 

I hear the continents are drifting like great granite pirates

and that matter hangs like a tapestry

whose threads are wove through vacuum,

that birds are fragments of dinosaurs and

whales invented algebra,

and I believe it

all for the sake of wonder.

 

And if philosophy might be science with a leaning toward hyperbole,

if paleontology could cohabit with quantum field theory

and plate tectonics meld with ethnomusicology (shanties, specifically),

if mathematics joined hands with cetology,

if we cared to make a whole of all we knew in part,

then birds are heirs to brontosaurs

and whales taught Newton calculus

—logic weds with art,

and wonder, like a weed the garden needed, grows through all we know.

 

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