“The Poet and the Scientist,” by Rose McLarney (Poetry ’10)

(The piece excerpted below, a work by poetry alum Rose McLarney, appeared in Orion.)

MY FATHER has collected the most substantial body of fish-based Index of Biotic Integrity data for a watershed of its size anywhere in the world. This is an accomplishment he can claim.

Though there are too many dull, qualifying words inserted between those superlatives — or at least that’s what I think.

He conducts his study in one North Carolina county (the county that’s our home). Every summer, he returns to the same sites he’s visited for decades. He sinks an electroshocker’s probes into the streams and nets the dozens of fish that float from the bottom, stunned.

But I want to describe this as spectacularly as the real thing. He conjures metallic, alchemical slivers. Their upturned bellies flash, surprising — the white of revelation.

Read the rest of “The Poet and the Scientist” here: https://orionmagazine.org/article/the-poet-and-the-scientist/