As I walked the west side of Lake Union, the words appeared as heavier versions of the magnet poetry you see on the occasional refrigerator door. Bronze letters stuck in concrete, deep enough to sit flush with the surface, could be potentially printable if a giant press flipped the sidewalk, Inception-like.

JUST                A                SWITCHING     TRACK

The words scattered between a short section of rails also sunk into the Seattle concrete. Other fragments sprinkled Native words for "water." And I'm sure I missed more than a few. None were poetry, but they evoked it, the feeling of play in language — more significant because of their location.

I've long believed the world needs more poetry in more public spaces.

How I enact this conviction splits two ways. Sometimes, it means pointing out the surprising places poetry already exists...on Navy ships and in the wilderness. Other times, it means direct addition, creating my own work or supporting that of others.

But I can't say whether I'll ever extend my influence beyond this planet. Pythagoras first proposed the idea that cosmic bodies emitted some fundamental harmony, the music of the spheres. We've (sort of) identified blips of our universe's elemental audio.

At some distant day, though, a future astronaut might happen upon the work of Ada Limón, U.S. Poet Laureate. Her poetry will be engraved on a floating archive, the spacecraft headed to Europa, which orbits Jupiter.

"A briefer length of moon / Will mark the sea-line and the yellow dune."
 

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This newsletter was written on the traditional lands of the Piscataway and Nacotchtank.