Aubrey Lieberman Selected Poems and Essays

  Aspiration In a perfect world every child would be at the center of a universe the gravitational core around which a family revolves during a sacred moment in time when happiness is  as ubiquitous as stardust and joy as boundless as space itself Matter converges and systems cool along the arrow of time New stars are born The adults produced by these astronomical forces by generations of dedicated parents grandparents siblings and relatives merge with others  who were blessed to have evolved in a similar way This is the hidden energy we call the greater good the good which is destined to expand to fill the gaps between the never ending rungs on the stairway to heaven Aubrey Lieberman 8/8/21

  The blind side Evolution did not provide us with eyes in the back of our heads My GoPro camera does the job well With it I can see my blindside and it is truly beguiling The 180° which we hear but do not see is as beautiful and instructive as the world is in front of us To only see in the direction we are moving is an essential evolutionary compromise We may glance figuratively and literally into the space behind with the turn of our head a pivot on our feet the rearview mirror or the back up camera in the modern car It is perilous potentially lethal to become fixated on what is happening behind us A rearview camera stores memories of the background so that we may examine it at our leisure These recorded sights and sounds remind those of us with binocular vision and big brains that it is critical to pivot to look back in order to move forward in our place and time Aubrey Lieberman 10/17/21

  Traffic I awake at dawn and drive east  as the sun rises into the blue sky enclosed in a cocoon shielding me from the cold wind and the noisey turbulence of my vehicle moving through air ten times faster than our ancestors could run for very short distances during most of human history Some sea and air traffic  reaches the city of Boston on its coastal side but most people and those they serve cascade toward its skyline from the north or west or south Streams of cars in orderly lanes two or three or four move side by side diverging and converging slowing down and speeding up as orderly as a school of fish a flock of birds or a migrating herd The gaps between the vehicles increase and decrease predictably in accordance with speed and safety like springs loading and unloading when viewed from above Asphalt lines and curves and asymptotes contrast with the natural meandering of the rivers and streams so apparent to us from the sky now a familiar perspective for many of us...

  Resilience The power of this word from the latin which means to leap again is an idea which encompasses the meaning of life the drive which enables us to exist to persist  despite the odds We are able to gaze far beyond the galaxies around ours into boundaries at the end of physical creation We live in exceptional circumstances always searching for life beyond our biosphere the evidence  for which remains elusive But it is here where the gift of life abounds where improbability so repeatedly triumphs in every corner nook and cranny on this planet  where the force which we call life prevails Aubrey Lieberman 4/24/22

  Passport I am an indigenous earthling as are you That is all we have and all we need to know  to live here   Aubrey Lieberman 5/11/22

  A festival of birds Walk  out of the door and into the cacophony that is the sound of summer Stop  and listen to the symphony to the choir  of many thousands Look and see just a few of the many and through your binoculars only one or two Place your birdfeeder near a window and hide inside still in the shadows Dance for this is the festival of birds which fill your heart with song your eyes and ears with delight Bask in the splendor  of two hundred and fifty million years  of avian life on the planet we share Bathe with our feathered friends Aubrey Lieberman 6/4/22

  The wave in the watering can I stuffed a hose into the big opening at the top of the container the water rising higher than the opening to the spout with the can at rest on level ground on this hot summer day And then I walked  steadily along the driveway handle in hand watering can dangling at my side creating a one per second spill of consistent volume  upon the hot asphalt along a curvilinear trajectory in a world I could see reflecting precisely the presence  of an invisible wave my movement had created in a bucket The spill stopped on the uphill slope the invisible wave continuing but its energy now insufficient to enable water to reach the spout and spill onto the blacktop When I stopped to water the flowers the wave collapsed  the source of its energy having dissipated The still water was drained away transferred to the soil and then the roots on an alternate journey to the sky while the wet spots on the driveway dried up quickly in the sun Those partic...

  Choice On planet earth in the common era it is common for pathological processes to produce human bodies without functional brains and not uncommon for pathology to result in brains without functioning bodies I believe if given the choice our first impulse would be to be a brain Upon further consideration most of us may choose to be a body in which the mind which once belonged to it has evaporated Futurists may choose to have all that is them in a conceptual sense uploaded into a machine a system of neural networks capable of massive parallel processing at immensely superhuman speeds Thinking at such high speed  might create life  approaching the speed of light millenia passing in the blink of an eye the thinker disappearing into the singularity almost instantaneously  Assuming you chose as an alternative way of prolonging life an existence in a supercooled system one approaching absolute zero information processing  would be so slow that you could live from o...