the accelerator poetry project

In April 2012, these lines were inscribed on the wall of the 800 MeV linear accelerator tunnel at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where I worked for 22 years: 

A new world / is only a new mind.

    William Carlos Williams

If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.

    William Blake

There are designs that seem like chaos / only because you're too close.

    Dean Young

To have become immortal transcends to become so.

    Emily Dickinson

Wracked by jetsam, we cry out for flotsam.

    John Ashbery

Let be be finale of seem.

    Wallace Stevens

The field is not well seen from within the field.

    Emerson

The tree that from the bare air / Plucks its fruit lives forever.

    Vicki Hearne

You must be your own absence with fifty percent deity.

    Dana Levin

The present / must be kept empty / so that anything / can happen:

    Rae Armantrout

Full moon, we say, as if it weren't always full.

    Jon Davis

Sometimes / all love can do is be / nowhere: be ready.

    C. John Graham

Tell the truth exactly, it will make / no sense.

    Donald Revell

so the apple tree in flower proves / not fruit but the sun

    Dan Beachy-Quick

Without innocence, experience can only repeat itself.

    Donald Revell

Sometimes one fingers annihilation / before breaking into bliss.

    Arthur Sze