"The Longing of the Feet"

At first the crawling

child makes his whole body
a foot.

One day, dazed
as if by memory,
he pulls himself up,

discovering, suddenly,
that the feet
are for carrying

hands. He is so
happy he cannot stop
taking the hands

from room to room,
learning the names
of everything he wants.

This lasts for many years
until the feet,
no longer fast enough,

lie forgotten, say,
in the office
under a desk. Above them

the rest of the body,
where the child
has come to live,

is sending its voice
hundreds of miles
through a machine.

Left to themselves
over and over,
the feet sleep,

awakening
one day
beyond the dead

conversation of the mind
and the hands.
Mute in their shoes,

your shoes
and mine,
they wait,

longing only to stand
the body
and take it

into its low,
mysterious flight
along the earth.

--"The Longing of the Feet" by Wesley McNair, from The Town of No. © David R. Godine, 2010. Reprinted with permission.

WA

Vital information

Here's a better media diet to begin the day with. Bill McKibben said we're the age of missing information, but it's out there just waiting for us to pay attention.

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A 🐕’s life

If I Were a Dog

by Richard Shelton

I would trot down this road sniffing
on one side and then the other
peeing a little here and there
wherever I felt the urge
having a good time what the hell
saving some because it's a long road

but since I'm not a dog
I walk straight down the road
trying to get home before dark

…

sometimes in the afternoon we could
go to the park and she would throw
a stick I would bring it back to her

each time I put the stick at her feet
I would say this is my heart
and she would say I will make it fly
but you must bring it back to me
I would always bring it back to her
and to no other if I were a dog

"If I Were a Dog" by Richard Shelton, from The Last Person to Hear Your Voice. © University of Pittsburgh Press, 2007. Reprinted with permission.

https://open.substack.com/pub/thewritersalmanac/p/the-writers-almanac-for-thursday?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios

Evolution, beneath the radar

It was on this day in 1858 that joint papers about the theory of evolution, written by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, were presented to the Linnean Society of London.

Wallace was only 25 at the time that the papers were read, and Darwin was 49. Darwin had begun formulating his theories about natural selection about 20 years earlier, but he was a slow, methodical worker, and he thought that since no one else had the same ideas, he might as well take his time. 

Young Alfred Russel Wallace, on the other hand, had no such hesitations. He'd done his fieldwork in Malaysia and Indonesia, studying animals there, based in good part on geology. He came up separately with the idea of natural selection as the mechanism of evolution. When Darwin found out about it, he was shocked, so he rushed to get his ideas into print.

The truth is that neither man dreamed up his theory of evolution out of nowhere. For many years, scientists had known that evolution existed — that species were created and became extinct over time. The problem was, they didn't know why.

Neither Darwin nor Wallace was present to read his own paper on this day in 1858. Wallace was still in Malaysia, and Darwin was mourning the death of his young son Charles. The meeting itself was long and boring, with an announcement of donations and gifts to the society, then a new member of the council was elected, and a long tribute was delivered in memory of a member who had recently died. Then the presentation of papers began, first an excerpt from Darwin's On the Origin of Species, then a letter from Darwin, then Wallace's paper, "On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type." After that, there were five more papers presented — other topics included "The Vegetation of Angola" and "Hanburia, a new genus of Cucurbitaceae." The meeting took several hours, and most of the gentlemen who heard the papers were so lethargic from all the information thrown their way that they didn't realize that anything out of the ordinary had happened. So even though this is the day that one of the most revolutionary ideas in science was delivered to the public, it barely made a wave.

Darwin's On the Origin of Species was published a year later.

https://open.substack.com/pub/thewritersalmanac/p/the-writers-almanac-from-monday-july?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios