The Earth Is Not Flat

Not Just Having the Feeling

42 Not Just Having the Feeling 1. But being able to name it, at least the features it shares with some other feeling you already know. 2. Like the virus you’ve never seen before, backlit against the microscope’s slide: find a familiar bump or trail of hairs, likeness to hook it to, to draw it from the netherworld, where everything lives until it has a name, into this world. 3. Otherwise, the feeling, the virus, that bird flying not through air but through water, is the ghost of something. 4. The woman from the cruise ship says, I have no words for this place. None of the superlatives will do. 5. Out on the water, I can hardly tell one island from the other, there are so many to learn, or them from the point where my tiny home perches—until I say there’s the glacier, and am replaced. 6. From there, I know Cormorant, Old Palmer, Jacobs. This one has birds, that one topography, and an iceberg we call Mark Wahlberg lets the wind take him where it will. 7. Here, on station, the sky fills the whole window, as does the ocean, and there is nothing we can do about it. 43 8. The window gives a limit. 9. Outside on the walkway, a sheathbill dawdles, looking like Winston Churchill. The glacier 10. Cycles through its moods, this one blue. ...