The Bubble Room, Ashland, Oregon, 9 April 2017

When we first reached the science museum
There was a school bus of kids unloading
And daughter decided she wanted nothing
To do with them. She suggested a picnic
In the cemetery instead. So that's what
We did, eating stale cookies on a tombstone
And feeding the ants who coursed the moss
The crumbs. A daisy, a dandelion, a spring
Raw wind under the eaves of the oaks. 

Almost done. Three deer browsed the plots
Upwind of us. Light midday traffic passed.
The ants fairly boiled over our crumbs.
I bet if you dig down there's only bones
Said daughter. We read a few dozen stones,
Looking for the oldest ones, which seemed
To date mostly from the 1870s. They were
Mostly in surprisingly good trim. A few
Had ornate pillars and carving on four sides,
Which daughter supposed might belong
To royalty. The closest to that we got
Was one Kentuckian whose pillar narrated
His arrival in the Rogue Valley alone
Mid-nineteenth century and boasted
Of how the Indians came to fear his valor.
After a while it grew chillier and daughter
Changed her mind about visiting Science
Works. We played with the interactive
Exhibits for a couple of hours, the kind
Involving echo tubes, optical illusions,
Pressure chambers, lightning spheres,

Lots of pulleys and ropes, levers, buttons,
Funhouse mirrors, air harps, frozen shadows
And general demonstrations of how
Things move, gravitate, wobble, shriek.
In the end, it was the bubble room entranced
Daughter by far the longest. Other than
A plaque on one wall drily explaining
That bubbles have a lot in common
With balloons and are what scientists call
Minimum surface objects, et cetera,
There wasn't really much science to it.
It was just an excuse to have some fun
Exploiting the same raw rules of the world
That guaranteed bones and ants and deer,
Tension and change. She swung large arcs
Of bubbles that billowed out in rainbows
And wobbled about the room, shiny eggs.
She stood in the chamber that allowed her
To haul on a ring up from her feet and raise
A bubble wall around her in a tall cylinder
That convexed and concaved, an hourglass
That collapsed inward and turned to spray.
What did it feel like? It's just gone, she said.