How Shall I Tell You? You have measured Her. By specific gravity alone you know whether an object will float without throwing it in the water. Without leaving your seat you know how long it would take us to get to the nearest star or the farthest galaxy (were we light). You know the circumference and precise location of an atom (if it is sitting still). And you have named Her. You have given every bone and piece of protoplasm in Her body strange Latin names that make Her seem a stranger to one like me who understands English only barely and doesn't even know what language is nor the meaning of a word like "is". You have predicted Her. You have said what the clouds will look like tomorrow when I had always thought She did them on a moment's notice to delight goosepimply children lying on their backs on docks gently rocking. You have mastered Her. Your acid rain determines which lakes shall live and which shall die. Yet you do not understand that even the condescension by which you preserve an endangered species is to Her an insult and a sacrilege. Sacrilege is of course no longer a legal word. The verification principle (that final and most high court of words and what is real) has banished sacrilege from the community of acceptable words (this being done after it was found to have been conducting a secret affair for a long time with flim-flam). How then shall I tell you? She is unhappy. She may wither up and die like a marasmus baby too depleted in her soul even to eat or cry. But why should you listen to me? You have measured Her. You have named Her. You have predicted Her. You have mastered Her. Yes. But I have slept with Her, And I know.