This is the third section of Lyn Hejinian's poem sequence The Cell (1992), a series of meditations on the embodied self, partly inspired by the pragmatism of William James and the philosophical observations of everyday landscapes in Henry David Thoreau's writings, partly by a commitment to avant-garde proceduralism, and partly by interest in the principles of scientific research. Tacit allusions to science are everywhere: in references to methodology (exploration, objectivity); in technical vocabulary (sentience, interstitial, ovoid, optical); and in the style, which emulates the self-correcting precision based on repeated observation typical of reports of scientific research. This evidence might appear to support the interpretation that this is a poem of quasi-scientific inquiry. And yet not only is it a poem and therefore an inappropriate mode of writing for scientific research, what is worse is that this poem does not even offer us the usual solidities of a normative poem. It has very little punctuation and its syntax is sometimes unresolved, its paratactic sentences are often sharply disjunctive, there is no narrative or scene setting for its meditations, and though we can gain glimpses of an argument, it is not sustained and nor are its components obviously affirmed. We therefore cannot easily attribute to the poem or the author any specific engagement with the sciences.