Closing Column

The following poem was written by Pulitzer Prize-winner Claudia Emerson, Arrington distinguished chair in poetry and professor of English at the University of Mary Washington, on the occasion of Dr. William J. Frawley's inauguration as the seventh president of the University of Mary Washington.

Art of Science

I.
Here we measure and re-measure the depths
of histories, ruins, bodies of water;
we build sculptures, proofs, arguments, create
narratives, the theories of narratives,
lyrics, scores. Everywhere we are at study:
intent on books and screens, microscopes, charts—
maps of the world, the brain. In the dismantling
of the anatomical model, we memorize
the architecture of our own bodies.
Out of our compulsion to know, record,
salvage, and save, we cut deeply, carefully,
into the body of the bird, the tree, rock, and poem.

II.
The amphitheatre, abandoned now to the deepening
shadows of beech trees, was built into a natural
depression, the school ordered on the hillside
above. Tiered stone benches look down on the stage
as though an audience might still be seated
to catch the rising lines of A Midsummer
Night’s Dream. The fleeting fact of being here
never enough, for years we have recorded
some proof of us into these trees—easy
to carve even with the dullest knife—hearts,
arrows, our initials, names like slow echoes rising
into widening artifacts that survive us.

III.
In the laboratory, the ornithologist has catalogued
the study skins he prepared himself, ordered
neatly in gleaming drawers. If a book or image
taught all, we would not be here to hold the lark,
turn it over in our hands, feet and bill
threadbound—eyes of cotton clear instruction
not to confuse it with the living. If any
of our industry succeeds, we will leave
these grounds able to see against the sky,
and not merely recognize, but know the eagle,
osprey, hawk—and all that brought about
the seeming ease of inaugural flight.