A Poem of Science,
Or This Our Frost-Weary Harbor
In Three Books
By J. Celan Smith
Copyright 2012 Jonathan C. Smith
Smashwords Edition
Table of Contents
Book 3: Biology, Zoology, Genetics
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I invoke you, O friend, and none else,
To wind a ways down into labyrinth wild
Where the Minotaur may be waiting for us,
But, no doubt, I have brought Ariadne's string.
Come, slide with me through serpentine
Corridors and then out into forests as we go
To the varied landscape of esoteric springs!
Let us dance far and wide to oak groves
While we sing the ravages
Of savvy love and its redemptions
That with foam took them on Eleusinian currents,
No drones or pariahs, but sailors
Of the mystic winds and waters
Rushing to cold veins they wished to swim.
These sacred monsters we are following
To see where they’ve been and where they lead.
Smile, O friend, by my side
While we walk this history’s trail and send chants
To echo in those yet silent cisterns
Formed from orphic caves they craved to
See, smell, handle, hear and taste, these people
Of science impassioned, moving in vectors away
From the chicanery of claptrap
Into an embodied place whose wounds I feel.
They ate atoms, jungles, mutations, yet
Did not sit to drink image of song or to know
What meditation can do, so furious were they in search
Of pure bodies, invisible yet tangible
Amongst array and deckle of unslattern variety.
Scientists, they want their hymns
To company that feast laid out for them,
And I have useful voice,
With you present to journey, so I will sing
As vibrant as possible, lungs possessed of clean air
On which these tunes shall shiver
At this festival to make more merry, more
Palpable as sound in those halls where silence
About science has no truck.
What matters most is you with me, not I as self alone.
Theirs were gelid pools, and we still inside them,
Free-stroking between enchanted corals
That shouldn’t be there, but as fossils yes
With few mystic fingers on the boreal forests where
Dancers have always gathered in animal skins
To writhe and worship.
Pray tell, did they
Ever think to look elsewhere, outside the
Albino realm and Man? Were mostly this, yet not
All, these bleached troubadours of gnostic ballad,
Eurocentric crooners of our father’s heavy sway
Down through drunken gullies of playlorn History.
’Twas Science that looked only within, wasn’t it?
Its gaze fixed on selfsame likeness, voices
Of sultry melody that like a stone or a wave had
Consummate unconsciousness of schizophrenias.
Yet here we are to be beautiful,
Aren’t we? Is not inclusion that part of beauty
That widens our brim to catch
More sunshine or snow? Ah yes, the ballad gradually
Had to fall, to wriggle downward for
Another tune, must have taken a turn somewhere.
Today there are more colors than white, and more figures
Than masculine inhibitions believe.
Yet sing with me their songs,
To bid them go!
Slake your thirst in their sagas,
Those excluders
Whose broodsome leaps have led us here
But are no longer, except in spirit,
Our sovereigns!
If nothing matters now, O Age of Matter,
Information, Relativity, then let us speak wildly
About our fate or fortune, our past and its
Dreams. Let us reminisce, before it’s over,
Praising or stinging that heap of male
Albumen in a style that fits the frenzied nights
Of this, our frost-weary harbor.
Pretend not, which is worse denial, nor
Preach and pander, for here I offer
My face,
Here is my face,
The one I stare at each morning,
Is the enflamed aspect of google-eyed man,
Of tele-pleated skin grooved
With gossip and drooped with strange fatigue.
Oh, don’t get me wrong, I’m pretty, I’m handsome,
But the mirror I speak of sends to the inside
Of things,
To a place where my chalice does not flow,
But sits empty in dust and cobwebs.
That is a current sensation, and with you
On this odyssey, there is juice and wine to fill all
Bowls and pores!
I will toast then what shall no longer be mentioned.
Here’s to that glorious Truth of media tire!
Let it be, or may it not be for its exhaustion!
In any case, we shall not be the ones
To bring it down.
Rather, should we walk together, whistling our creations
And our loves. I see only you in the Real,
Where there are no make-ups, mirrors or cameras
But just paths to travel!
If Industry is barren of daring, we
Shall not rest in complacency, for we believe
That all is expressible and voice-worthy, fearlessly
As much as those people who gave imprimatur
To this ragged and chaotic concept
That sweeps us free of our Real being.
Salute the unpasteurized poetry!
Down with saccharine vaccinations! Together,
Make way for an exfoliated speaking whose cyclopedic
Tongue and spit-shined lips revolve around blood
And rivers of poison and venomous winds of beauty
That whirl circles around a landscape enraptured!
All the leaves come down
As in autumn when poetry’s heart like music
Is made for children. Ah yes, I jest,
For precocious souls alone would approve such
Ritual chantings in the bedroom chambers of Nature.
But write for the young
Where they are, to tell them where we
Have been, no matter how sordid the narrative with
Flaws and scandals, with exclusions and vendettas.
Salute today’s lives, indeed, but
Yesterday’s saints will I revere equally, or
Chastise, spurning doomsdays and grey blossoms
Of shameless promotion.
I will sing neither lunatic nor mainstream,
With less optimism than Whitman, but more
Restraint than Poe, there caverned in dark virtues,
Our inimitable saints no less than
Dickinson, Plath and Rimbaud.
I shall sing the heroes of past time, whose busty
Ambition strove to change this Earth with
Science. For better or not, but claim that these
Have altered space of mind for us,
Whose lives and bodies chanced after.
Little might you know some names associate
With genius, whose stars birthed them to tasks of
Transformation. Yet some you have heard,
For fame’s breath travels wide on electronic wings
And the days have claimed them admirable.
I shall celebrate in disarrayed compass this Science,
Not comprehensive but multivalent in forms
That rose with glass from Renaissance Venice, surpassing
The casks of Arab’s skilled preserve
Which locked and lengthened History’s store of
Math’s wisdoms.
Today we are ruled subtly by the mass these heralds
Measured out, no kings
But princes and queens in the spheres limned
By thought, whose magic flamed the brain’s dull metals
And of minerals and animals
Made new visions, divisions and incisions, so that
We, without number, might impute to their piercing
Wanderings high and low, far and deep, in Matter,
Such wondrous prescience, such precious marvels
As before the world hadn’t known, and bless them
With our small consecrations, perhaps
Praising progress in toil.
Nor shall the muse come alone, but I will share
What towers and spires she has taken me to,
Viewing some ages past these modern
Titans, who superb have so rarely been danced
In rhythm and lyric song but so often
Plotted in plodding scholarship’s prose.
Cleared what is possible, and what cannot be
They bound up in body, soul, star, grass or planet,
In fire, air, earth, water or slime, and gave over their
Lives in silver cost of health and vanity
For discovery of shrouded galaxies bulging
With seething Truth.
Songs are not made in their honor, yet why,
I ask, should myth in lyrics not fly, cloaking in fabric
Of remembrance he or she whom noble statues sail
At eyes in courts, he or she whose portraits pine in
Galleries, dusted only as if by dull, blind lashes?
These are the new myths, I say, and someone
Shall not fail to summon Calliope or Terpsichore
As pop-star shakers, that by investment
Of avatar’s heat, spangled and roving with image,
They may erect an equal memorial
Upon hallowed bones, only now in swooshed tongue
And glossolalia.
Preserve for us these myths of Science, O goddess,
Told not just as though in old saint’s legends but
Shown as true by gush from experienced springs.
They come Celtic to soak us, consciousness as deluge,
Cataracts purging sinful ignorance and preparing the
Promise of the Real beyond ancient superstition.
What is myth after all but the symbolized of
Special declarations, lived through prophetic
Stance, a starry description to process the ascent of
Discovery or revolutions as structures shake and
Tremble under impulse of new dreams, desires, rebellions,
Like someone whose chemical skin wants smoke
But eats language instead.
But we have that loss we feel, stinging
Loss for the days of Persia, Babylon, Sudan,
Abandoned by our awareness, their tales left
Haunting ghosts, mere whispers of old goats
In tenebrous groves.
They feed us no longer, these fairy-golden boughs,
These symbols of a past
Umbrage in grottos so servant to fancy,
In atavistic and primordial fetters that our new
Glintings have since smashed like bad prisms, beaming
Instead Reason’s light into the recess
That is no more our repository.
Science, I croon joyously!
It is the melody of our modern being!
It is the new symphony of our understanding, the balm
To our longing ache
With its reptilian cadence or avian buzz
In this world driven mad with noise. Science
Trumps the swarthy hollows, throws mental bombs
Into the abyss of fear, explosions of atmosphere like solar
Vibrations carrying across dark centuries,
Its revelations hot as lava
Bright-laved over this salting life, cooling in claret
Streams we now christen with vigorous screech.
Science! O how to sing your worth?!
How to mimic in sweet sounds the constellation
Of refulgence you are
When all our words are seeping into oblivion’s swallet,
Pouring into oubliette,
And we scarcely can reach our hands
Past the clamping lid, left with only fading comets
From which to gather the ashen scarab
That once shone vibrant as polished glass.
Is there some way to stir such evocations?
The sun another hope for salvage of
Words, photons she has explained, illuminating
The air near us, which remains silent,
Gives no signs or light to speak at all? What torch
Of syntax and semantics
Hovers above the misty woods like a moon through
Eerie limbs or Friar’s lantern,
Coaxing a lonesome voice for your adventures wondrous,
Your conquests and painted vistas?
The love of beauty’s being you have
Transmuted to study and experiment of
Being’s substance, but were acts of amorous
Exploration, were they not? (And who
Could blame that?) For the forms you stroked in lust
Were the Earth’s sacred topiary and the Sky’s thick phallus.
These are mysteries universal
That forever before you in night’s castle
Had lived high and inaccessible, like the maiden
Of long hair evading your chasings. With love,
You pursued as one begging to fondle the arcane,
To get the elusive skin
Of what Is, craving the occultic formulas
As if to betroth mind to spirit’s vapor and thus
Embrace your desired mate.
Yes, be true to your truth, you thought-immigrants!
Admit that your thirst was for love, made of love, and that
Love was of jealous control, or like a snake’s
Tail which whips and rattles, of threat and fear as
Faced with incertitude, suspicion or designs
You could not endure.
Therein the power you sought and forced
By steely will, all to Know, Impose, Ply Tools
Like technic craftsmen, no better than blacksmiths,
Against unruly matter or absence,
Wherever your survey roamed, mount to glacier to glebe
Or out to the unfathomable darkness
You collected in jars. The power, I say,
That was your mind’s engine, the flaming coal
Thrusting you from chaos to comfort like Lucifer
Approaching the garden and, there,
To soothe that desire
To punish nature’s recalcitrance, to break god’s
Spell (really your own sorrow) by finding
Through knife-cut its properties and absolutes.
Thus was dissolving
What seems a sort of temerity, the fear
About the unknown. To capture, and with more knowledge,
To appease the gnawing hanker for order within you, that
By this stomach’s full, the narcotic might fall
Like marcid leaves to creation’s sod, lean and useless.
Never scorpion sex did unleash you, bottled
As you were like fine spirits in another place, not sensual
But sensing, thinking with perceptions,
With libido for testing,
Dumping Epicurean eyes on forms unnoticed,
Not the curves and knots of human flesh, rather
The flesh of what makes up World! Oppressed
By ignorance as one who cannot afford
Heat, an angered perplexity equipped your odysseys
With wit, with reason
For the long-candled nights that made heroes
Of you. Your books were no ploughshares,
Swords rather, words
Like axes against tradition’s timber, and you,
The Rebels proud as Absalom and Guevara!
Courageous as Rosa Parks!
One sees not a little logomachia, feels the chairs
Clatter in rage across the society halls, thrown against
Aim of untruth so to vindicate your achievements to that
Colony of Mind that cradled such ego, such
Desire for knowing, the Yang which
Wished recognition and made raindrops seem like
Steel slicing against awareness’ skin.
But if not for this energy within you,
Would we have learned the Forces
You brought forth from the banned caves
They so long rested in, or the Laws
Like furry bundles in hibernation, secret
Creatures with unfamiliar hearts
Whose pulsation circulated the wind, the planets, the sea
And all else our feeble clay feels as the Real?
I guess it is time, we shall see!
Let us approach our lyric history like one who
In forest dances spasmic around pixie roots!
At our access is this madding story so electric!
So let us exemplify the contemporary age with our
Ready-at-hand knowledge and our cursory bang at
Computer’s lettered keys. For here, I say,
Is the poem of our day.
It is plucked and culled from so much swaggering
Ease and refuse, so much info-garbage as to be
Bound to reflect what all can so facilely call up. The limits
To shallow maneuvers have never been so weak.
This I must celebrate, for it is us! O poets deluded,
It is us! It is our paradox, our sphinx, our koan!
O scientists and business jockeys, we live, I say,
In the administration of sloth and cold drives, chained
Like polymers to corporate matters. Escape it,
If you can, or celebrate! Revile it, if you must, then thrive
With a precious tranquility in either choice
Rather than fester with a lonely resentment.
Till death do us part
Each way, and we penniless have too little time.
****
Copernicus
Of the finny tribe, you delved
Into the deep swarm of stars, not content
To swoon at terrestrial corals, and saw
In that celestial ocean, Aldebaran,
Eclipsed by Diana’s breasts, the bull’s-eye
Darkened to disturb you about Mercury
And the disordered planets. Your curious eye
Was harpooned by Pico’s trident. Roomed
With Bologna’s astrolabe, who taught you more than
Medicine or therapy of lights in wounded dispositions.
Hints then
Of new orbital charts, naïve as spheres, crowded
The piety that cherished you, positioned
On the porch of math from which
The book would be birthed. Was a Polish tome,
Not Greek, that brought its simple perfume
To tradition’s lorish reek, spraying the errors
Of Stagirite and Almagest with ripe sprigs of emendment,
Now the world full of scented abandonment.
Were you aware (of course you were) that
The epiphany to be unleashed, a revolution
On revolutions of orbs, would so crush our hearts
With the Truth of our Smallness?
Would remove all our proud-won claims to
Superiority?
You hid the news till deathbed, exposed
To rumor’s flight over Europe. As you lay dying,
There held its product on your chest, moments
Like Atlas-weight in that paper, and there
Expired, a mellifluous saint.
What tremulous wake was left!
Was a mountainous wave, tsunami
Of thought that towered above this now displaced
Rock, disfigurement of worlds,
Still verdant, but disgraced as but a tiny globe
Of shadows in which man's vices and
Pleasures sped circular as Earth itself
In a doomed spiral whirl
Around the immovable plant,
Set and stationary center, whose insane light
Did not flee like the sanctioned consensus of centuries
That your cleric soul had sought to banish.
Who, then, we wonder,
Tended to Sky’s brewery? Who built
That refurbished cathedral so needed
Out of the fire’s ashes, now that your new hops
Were stirred and boiled into the cauldrons, or heated
On the stoves of Medieval Science
And its derelict bakeries? Not long your champion
Arose to advance by mirrors
The fellowship of Helios, and to uncut the wicked
Thread of that nemesis, Osiander, whose letter
Could only have backfired under force of your groundwork.
Kepler
O premature Swabian, why as rooted Earth
Did you not burrow in caves like archeologist
To seek the hieroglyphs as though tapping on
Pyramid walls? Signs the priests, not Euclid,
Designed as gateway to the mystery you loved.
Or why not follow, O son of mercenary brave,
Into the chemistry of picked herbs
From the inn’s gardens where mother practiced her
Healing ways? Fortunate are we, let’s say,
That your mind found another soil to till.
The planet’s roving stones had your rocks
Perplexed, about whose mystic
Paths so little light had then been shed. Shapes and angles
Loved you, crowding your fevered brain
In which like flocks they nested and chirped out the
Music of a magnetic soul you felt as sun,
Turning and turning their lips like tune machines
That no one but you
Could hear once the pox had scarred your eyes.
I can see you listening to distant
Balls, their hymns so crystal, fulgent of mathematical plan,
Possessed as the divine tongue had
Ordered it. You believed the fiat of harmony drawn
In God’s graceful geometry. From Mastlin’s Tubingen
To Tycho’s dim land along the gentle Charles,
No bone of data was left unscoured
By your wizardry’s inductive teeth. No scrap of
Numerical flesh went unplaced
In the idol of solids encased in spheres, the clinching icon
Of your youthful years. That crucible
Purged Nicolaus of epicycles and eccentricities
Like a blaze that swept pure
Through the forest’s Ptolemaic cabins.
What we know now, O orbital czar, thanks to your
Physics, is more than just the hexagonal symmetry of
Snowflakes or the truths of honeycombs or the wisdoms
Of parallax, pinholes and the camera obscura
Inside us. No matter the tessellations, polyhedrals,
Home bickering with wife, for at least in Prague
The imperial archive was yours
And you opened it, and in that flower
Was discovered by sure checks the real tables of
Flightsome paths whose glinting blooms in algorithms
You proved to Rudolph. Had their lived one more fastidious,
An accountant of star-spaced transactions? I imagine your
Crippled hands reaching to the heavens
To stretch circles into ellipses, or your lame legs crushing
Beans from peas. I know not if God made wine-barrels
Or put that connubial volume
Into our heads so as through the bung-hole his measures
Might spill out like reason,
Ruining the wedding feast, but I sense that the brew
Of fairywork was sacred to your
Longing heart, leading past portraits of Mama’s
Torture toward the stile of uranic realms
That you tapped for symphony. The cloak,
Fallen to ground, was no hindrance, yet in other
Garb you faced banishment, discredit, deviant arts that
Did not keep you from burying Barbara
In your son’s grave. That speaks the man,
Alethaic tunneller, no dreamer but a scientist mad
With numbers, desperate to honor cosmic duty
With religious zeal,
With erasure of creation’s mystery. Pythagoras
Never left you, always a ghost at your hip, as you
Gave horoscopes you hated the smell of, like ordure
Scraped by hens. The fiery Trigon placed
Conjunctions just so, as supernova
Burst to laugh toward supernal immutability.
That’s when you saw the Real variety,
As if magnified into possible moon voyages.
Out of life’s pressures came squares, cubes, areas,
Periods and distances, not rest or remove
In a monastery. It all quickened much as nearer
The flaming center which,
Now fixed on unsighted stake, spread internet
Of attraction, clarified, leading the Earth
And all Circles deeper
Into their tombs. Ah, to be so great as to explain
Secrets as none before, to set the ephemerides
In their certain pool! We owe you so much, dear Kepler,
And cannot refrain from blessing your work. Now
I imagine you below, measuring Gehenna’s shade.
Galileo
Who knows but that curiosity and desperation link
Hand in hand? If any, this era shows. At Pisan court,
A single lute played louder on that day
As a child of air, Aquarius’ emotionless spawn
Slipped from womb, replete
With fastened scowl and shaggy beard, eyes
In the limerick of stars. Already the prophetic welkin
Foretasted some waltz at bay, stumbled
To make itself a brighter whip that destiny
Could use in struggle, whose power
Lay in toppling institutions. As the timber fell
From mill, monks chanted under flickering lamp
In drab church, which he spied
Swinging in sacred breeze. His mental fingers counted
Pulse in neck, timing the swaying length he took
For pendulous promise. This began a search for laws
That could stanch his Tuscan boredom. By tutelage of Ricci,
He ran the dimensions of Dante’s demon-lord,
Ridiculous contest and no challenge like the parabolas
Of projectiles or tides which washed like waters in
Sloshing basins, moving against moonless shores
Where objects floated like whorish Japanese lanterns
Over the irregular nights, Earth speeding and slowing,
Definitely moving. The Earth moves!
Yes, we knew, but you, Galileo,
Garnered greater proofs, wishing to settle matter
As One thing, hoping to unify All so as to
Clear off the chaos of categories and elements,
To simplify its motion's twine using Archimedean machines.
And who doesn’t want that? To ply the razor
Against all unnecessary encumbrances, to lay out the world
As a Single Uniform Tapestry. Mathematics, a god, speaking
God’s language through weights and drops, a gravitas
Everywhere slicing to death the levitas,
Just as Cain slew Abel in the fields. All those desperate
Inventions, cleverly devised to pay for sister’s
Dowry—thermometer, compass, water lift—none
Could give his mouth a palate for Venetian wine
With its handsome aromatic bottles
Shaped like Ganymede but sour inside, nor did they
Shake the world so much as balls slid down the incline,
Heavy apocryphal things
Cast as we love to dream from leaning campanile.
They showed us how rude was Aristotle’s conception
That a feather strapped to an apple
Would slow progress down. No, earthen matter in a vacuum
Acts more clever! The lighter and heavier fall free at the same
Rate, winning a draw in distance travelled, proportional
To time squared.
He peed irreverently in ancestral vials, and like Jesus
Poured out crushed grapes
That changed humanity’s inebriation, those
Who would believe him once Marina was
Gone, unwed, and his daughters bumped against
Purity as prayerful nuns.
What came next, O experimentalist, O Platonist?
What then, O fly-by-night positivist?
For we know not what you were
After centuries of trying. Yet your effects stand with us,
So many scrapers in the architecture of advance,
Still and high, climbing up through clouds
Like beanstalk buildings, bomb-proof and dignified.
What came next, Copernicus redivivus, whose
Lens-crafted tube looked into perfect circles
(You rejected Kepler) and gleaned paste against Psalms,
Mere poet’s bunk under terrestrial sway? Your eyes
Engraved the wilds, seated at your window, turning
To vantage of heavens-dark the spyglass, and you
Glimpsed what no mortal ever had.
From lunar chiaroscuro, mountains Bohemic
Rose roughly, temples to shatter the crystalline teaching of
Brahe. From Jupiter’s dust, Medician satellites spun
East to west, presences unfamiliar that bespoke earth
As no center, just speck
Whose ranging rock was less impressive than
Io, Europa or Callisto. From crescent to gibbous, Venus
Disposed her lovely phases, slowly disrobing as for bath,
A heavenly Bathsheba that must have made the glass
Crack with ecstasy at vision
Of those feminine disks and lissome slivers. From flames,
Maculae spotted the corpse of sun like
Tropic plague. Thus was slowly eroded that distinction
Of ouranos and terra, dismantled now into herculean idea:
That all is one matter and one motion.
Who cares that comets
Are not sublunary, or that God failed
To make Joshua’s star stand still? Restless and rebellious,
You spurned brusque Bellarmine’s threats,
A true child of burnt Bruno, or Joan’s sister,
Seeking the day of Truth over dark
Tales of yore. You turned polemic against earth-slaved
Simplicio, pope of a system, whom you mocked defiant
And painted as dogmatic, one who would ignore
The force of percussion and who thought your horned helmet
For style not navigation. Would thrust you to
Inquisition.
But why did you kneel and sign, O one-eyed
Hero of investigation? Were you afraid for death but not
For authority? I see that frail form bent to abjure, prostration a
Symbolic gesture so meaningless, and hear as if still echoed
In the church’s dank stones, your faint imagined whisper:
“And yet it moves.”
Ah, such ponderous whisper! The mechanics of motion
Were never completely at grasp,
But as model ethereal for New Science, you broke
A silence accursed.
Now, float above our heads, O heresiarch!
Float with smirking lips and hoary wings,
The steam around you a sanctified aura like Saturn’s rings!
Today your teeth are scattered to the four corners,
Holding back more secrets I’m sure, and as justice ordains,
Your right middle finger flips from Florence facing Rome,
A derisive thanks from Museo Galileo.
Newton
O let the bugles sound triumphant!
Let them hail and blast our next guest’s entrance
With their exuberant décor! Warrior by Saturnine moods
Seduced, secretive and trustless goat-fish of winter’s
Solstice, Titan who like giant sleepers woke from
Slumber to wake us
At plaguey hour to our own ultimate
Introspections. Sir Newton, of Brittania’s isle kissed, no
Clown of Aegean sand’s warmth, but clear-dark with Northern
Chill and Atlantic depth, smaller than a pint mug
Till orphaned by illiterate yeoman, he endured
His tragic infancy. Abandoned by Hannah
As in Samuel’s book, yet not to fane,
The deprived of mother’s sweet care, he rankled
Insecure in Woolsthorpe fields not worth
His broody plough. Then walked with metallic mind
Plunged in black pavement, his way past hyped rewinds to
Cambridge rooms, which he cleaned for money,
And there began his lonely affair with Descartes
To replace, by that burning, the painful cross of absent
Maternal goddess.
Did any then spoon so deeply the
Starry soup, or reach into the hive of infinite series and
Function’s roots to pull forth such lucid honey?
Asked not why, but how, that was your question, taking off
From others’ shoulders to get to that!
Papers zinged like lightning bolts
Into the academic crowd, and when attacked,
You lashed with optic blade
Till rage sounded withdrawal. Hooke, eternal nemesis
And bitter elf, an equal hatred bound
In Everestine rivalry, whom eventually you bested
In a scud of irrational war
Between waves and corpuscles, between
Straight and undulous patterns of voyage.
In your dark room, experimentum crusis unraveled
Like a séance. Sunbeam
Sprouted through holey slat, then bloomed through prisms
Onto boards, twice separated and projected,
But only once
Split into rainbow. This would alter History’s rehearsal
Of light, its whiteness now seen as
Composite, secondary and heterogeneous,
A magic play of blended hues that
Set the primary colors on their original connate thrones.
Who can worship Phoebus without knowing
The mingled spectrum of which he consists?
Think not that such natural arcana could exit from mind
Less clued to grisly darkness
And its hauntings. Ah, how the battles took
Their toll, leaving Professor in spasmodic genuflection
Like an animal hit on the road, in its death throes bleeding
Broken guts. Like that, you raved, deranged
With lunatic speech in epistles to Pepys and Locke.
Yet how often you recovered to renew the conquest and
Controversy. Hard-shelled at times, explosively impassioned,
With hunch-backed Hooke you waged in fierce contest,
Spursome letters like daggers across your cellish table, now
A centrifugal whorl of Cartesian vertices
Which you screeched slow to halt like a dispowered
Generator. You saw at last that no
Whirlwind of planet could make for sustaining movement.
There must be the eye-slapped apple that tumbled,
Entrenched and plasmic attraction at the core of things,
Something like that,
Sorcering the saucering skulls to fly elliptic
Around the sun’s shining soul.
Yet let us never forget
The detour so crucial through alchemy, shame of Science.
It drew your mathsome mystic bent to its museful den,
Just as Circe lured the blind sailors to her caverns
With some impossibly enchanting song. There crashed
For several years on the shores
Of poisonous mercury, bubbling elixirs
With fumes swirling the air, there
You opened the case of mechanics and behold! Out
Of that sweat-streaked impulse, your veins
Green as fried copper, like hope past Pandora’s face
Zoomed intoxicated Gravity!
Yes, heroes need such
Darkling deliberations in the laboratory,
Reclused and bewitched by nocturnal delvings,
So let us not raise its rituals as image of opprobrium.
Rather, rejoice, I cry!
Resound praise at the willing dive toward magic
Which Isaac’s genius did not fear. He, our modern Beowulf
Compelled to the lair
To do muscle in murk and pant against frothing dragon.
So much more than infinitesimal calculus,
So much more that direct and inverse fluxions,
So much more than feuds with Leibnitz
That dragged on by proxy (irate at that one, his lampoon
Across the channel to scathe you with ridicule—God,
He laughed, must wind up his watch now and then?),
So much more, I say,
Else the true legend of Newton falter short.
Say what? Say the inimitable
Principia, that prince of principal books on
Principles of physics! Halley, not deaf to its sonata,
Clapped hands around the score and rushed
Its inky voice to bindery like a beautiful
Singing tattoo on a courtesan’s ribs. What laws
Inside it could boast such
Consummate simplicity? This, the code of Hammurabi
For the universe’s ethical motion! This, the black obelisk
Of true Science! This, an elegant synthesis that enlightened
Sphere’s ambulations, how comets and tides plash,
Precession of equinoxes, flattened poles and
Equatorial bulges, planetary masses! O my Lord! My Lord,
I faint with overload!
If any doubt the power of text,
Rest it! This bible united heaven and earth
Under single rule. Inertia shone like a new golden calf
Around which we danced in Aaron’s absence.
At rest, things tend to rest; in motion, tend
To uniform motion. Then F = ma,
Equation that chants how
Change is proportional to impressed force, how objects like
Billard balls fly off in the line
At which they are struck. Argue no longer, you said,
About mimickry, about whether each action is imitated
By an equal and opposite reaction. I have solved the sphinx!
And these were but the beginning rains, the stutters
Of wetness before the downpour. The world recoiled
When the final deluge came down: That all objects exert
A gravitational pull
Balanced to the quality of their matter! Reeling,
The universe spun and wobbled
More fiercely all of a sudden. In curves and furrows it
Yawed with love’s nervousness. Because of this great and
Loving attraction of all with all, this
F = GMm/R(2),
No one could then doubt our place,
Displaced for good, altered inexorably through this giant’s
Palms and new psalms.
Yet how such immensities must shiver,
Human after all, exhausting at the strain
In proportion to things happening above. To London’s
Sweet neice he went, science-weary eyes turned
To mint. Round they were as coins
That made silver melt from England, Flamsteed’s enemy
Now dictatorial, ruthless with royal youths
Who fought final wars like conscripts in his army.
When did you find time, O Isaac,
To write a million words on prophecies? Time to search
More hidden mysteries in scripture? To gesture
Toward the Real of apocalypse fulfilled? At Cranbury Park,
With its luscious elms and hanging willows, or some
Earlier place when you took an un-triune God for the
Galaxy’s governor?
We see you now, an Oxford
Stone, all that’s left, looking down
At that solid fruit. You do not float, as we wish you could,
For time has not been so kind.
We see you now, a Westminster slab, marbled below
Scroll and globe and pyramid. We see you now,
O fatherless,
O motherless Titan, as more than you saw yourself,
As a boy on the beach,
Collecting pebbles and shells, playing
To find the smoothest, the prettiest ones,
With swirl-stunned eyes, while the ocean of
Truth discloses its heavy pull of
Silence
To your even heavier soul.
O swimmer, we know you dove!
Halley and Herschel
Shake not at the seeming lesser, as if anyone
Or everyone, could be the greatest.
We have only one Rilke, one Lao-tse, one Sappho
In our art and many lesser, like I, whose creations
Are enough not to scoff at. Thus, two more,
Of a plethora of H’s, born under the zenith
Of Antares both, sons rich with body, Halley of Haggerston
And Herschel of Hanover.
Halley rose from affluent suds, smelling of ash and lye
In his father’s shop. To Oxford with instruments did go
At the time when Mars the moon occulted, to be Flamsteed’s
Aid and later enemy (who knows why but that vanity
In old age resents honor to its upstarts). Not long then
To southern isle did fly, venture to Saint
Helena’s hills, and from observatory
High, he spied the transit of the winged-shoed messenger,
Logging the hermetic god with the hemisphere’s stars. Dutiful
Yet undaring, the man put his 341 in books. Then back
To marry beautiful bride, no epithalamion given by poets,
Nor tragedy suspected, yet so soon, wedded bliss departed
And father vanished in unsolved mystery to die. He never
Saw his son as commander of expedition’s cruise.
Halley sailed, wifeless, on pink Paramour, affronted with
Naval mutiny, but did not swerve the course, held absolute
Against those who saw no value in Truth over war. At sea,
He stamped his isolines and longitudes
On waves, the solar heat motioning by wind and monsoons.
Far at north, gas seeped from earth’s hollow orifice into
Delicate virent wasps that played on eyes. Did you miss
That loving company, O sir, so far from home’s hearth,
Or were the lacteal lights from shipboard enough for your
Affection’s amusements? I, for one, cannot imagine such
Chosen leavings, such circumventions or
Feelings of service to a greater good
Than to wife or family, but I’ve not felt the drum of
Missionary zeal in my heart, the fervor for cause
That leads patriarchy on purposive abandonments.
Who cares you were Savilian or astronomer royale
Once that journey took place to graph the stars!
But you wanted to moisten as well, infatuated with sea
As with Sky. They saw your dive, a weird mix of fire and liquor,
To abyss of Thames, bells clanging near air barrels.
You stayed an hour, chatting with fish and friends. None
Had made such a dive before! I see you grow gills
And scales, put fins on those former
Wings, amphibian marvel to city’s strange applause.
Into the sea your catalyst pierced, but at last not this
But your fame was in deducing the comet’s orbit
Around sun. Oh, can we imagine a world without
Computations? From 1456 to 1682 you knew its
Cycle. What a shame that fate cut you short, your prognosis
Correct but your lungs too mortal to stay open. The prophet
Would perish ere that Christmas Day when
His eponymous firedrake returned.
The second, no founder of laws, no Solon but Herodotus,
Eminent chronicler, topographer of the vast galaxy.
He walked with eyes through constellations as ancient
As blood. No soldier, he skipped for England, night
In a ditch the deciding factor, not ambivalent about the
Dents in mud beside his helmet. In clever disguise, chose
Desertion over death so to seek haven for his delicate
Hands. They wished only for muse not trigger. Halifax parish
To the Octagon he played, composing pious ditties
In quiet chapel for whoever came for harbor’s pleasures.
That music changed, fingers once planted on ivory
With ears to organs sidling, now turned from those pipes
To tune telescopes that could dip for brighter lights.
His eyes, dirempt from paper, rapt on polished
Mirrors, they honed at what lay glittering
In sister-made tin where at tube’s base he saw it all,
The entire night Sky so clear! House of Herschel
Was observatory, cagey and cluttered atrium
Except where roofless, and there he walked past
Rats at coze, wearing his dainty lace ruffles as once for
Chamber, habit hard to sever. I see the organist prepared
To play with new instruments. He climbs the ladder of
Novum organum, homemade metal monster, from which
No sounds issued but the arias of heaven’s
Via Lactea, echoed down in twinkling songs from
Sequined chorus of night. Is done in vigil of winter,
From crepuscule to cockscrow, Herschel calling down
At dear Carolyn below, his spit like sleeting ice.
Sometimes her ink freezes inside the pen.
He resets the scope
Over and over, displacing star for next star
In the gelid crackling of outer sleeplessness, his own rest
Replaced by delight that
Kept him wakened. Carolyn as well, the admiring
Sister, sacrificial sibling so essential. Both suffer the
Hypothermic blasts, but in that chill
Emerges the greatest map of our Milky Way and its
Ninety thousand stars. One thousand double stars
Loped across solar space,
Could we say alive but undetected?
Yet that sole-shifting disk, in Gemini’s fissure adrift,
Was something besides twins. No human eye had acquainted
Georgium Sidus. But no star at all it was!
Afterwards, when fortune hailed on family,
Fame coming as if from blessed spark itself, the emanation
Articulated, the Earth would have its newest neighbor,
Named Uranus, in honor surpassing all
Of the house of Windsor. So amusing it is that one
Who discovered so many stars, nay even a Planet,
Should never have published a book.
Thermodynamics
But Heat, what? Had none thought of that but
Joule perhaps, seeing that nature conserves her energy,
Quantity neither created nor destroyed? We see that
A river in winter freezes but in its summer
Begins to steam. Changes, there are, but nothing
Is dissolved. Vanishing doesn’t exist in a Real sense.
What could the world do with that? As if poets
Of no rational dint had not known how alps are apt
To melt and glaciers to thaw under the hard torch
Of sun? Yet a Trinity of men grew up,
Triad of thermodynamics, and no optimists these
But a sinful trident upon which temperature
Claims its laurels.
Sadi Carnot, helot of heated mist,
Who before Diesel’s obsession, idealized
The engine. His model equated to efficiency based on
Reservoir’s climate, he strove to create a most perfect
Machine. Strangely, he forgot
Such a crucial simplicity, that hotter makes better, or so
They thought, those early denizens of hellfire.
Next came widowed Clausius, battle-wounded and
Brazen as Bush, the Aryan lawyer of Entropy
Announcing mordant design. His life with six children,
Lacking wife, was a run-down
Tending to maximum. For help, he wanted her back,
To make her live again, but alas!
As he lay on her grave, a cold advocate for a moment,
Aweep with loss, his breath dragon-steaming,
He conceived only that no process is possible
From chill to chill or freeze to roasting.
The reverse alone, his huge gain. Insight of insights
Into heat this was,
Telling us that energy flows ad lib
Hot to cold alone, and lacking exterior labor
Cannot revive the dead. No body by lay on its grave
Ever resurrects. Too chilled already! And none of us
Is Jesus to a Lazarus. Neither has anyone seen bricks
Assemble themselves into walls
Or waterfalls work backwards once plunged over cliffs.
The pessimistic prophet of toil, harbinger of today’s
Nightmarish heat, he saw only
What horrifies us most: Cold waste,
The cold chest, full of disabled energy, broken toys
The children no longer want, always building and growing,
Heap upon heap, in landfills and dumps,
Nature’s garbage bin
Chocked with what’s lost to man but can never be lost
To Earth.
The quantity stays steady, but now the surface
Is marred with disorder. Rudolf, who ignored snowflakes
And their configurations,
Who forgot to wonder about the products of
Seeds, eggs, salt crystals! These, my friends, our hopes!
For they show order out of disorder.
These our faiths! For the random generation of progeny
From mess comes from them! Proofs against
Entropy. Well, he could begin
Crying in despair. It’s all an
Irretrievable loss to him, irreversible
As History’s experience.
Let’s flail in extemporaneous death!
Can we imagine a worse scenario? Sheesh, what bad dream!
That was a bad dream.
See a world revealed of perpetual progressive
Degradation. No perpetuum mobile. No gains but only
Chaos and loss. No eternity but insufferable finitude.
The universe will stall atop a battery that forever
Winds downward. No God believable to boost its course.
No further sun to reverse its chosen source, expended
Like the sooty scarface against the coal-ugly niter
Of polluted cityscapes.
Listen, to the prophets of thermodynamics!
Bathe in their lakes!
We’ve heard hurricanes flailing through junkyards
Don’t make airplanes, and Kelvin, third of these dark
Lords, confirms this too. Yet mercy, what happened
On that honeymoon to sicken the starburst woman and
Send him on yachts to drop pianos into ocean’s
Glaucous waves? Did that transatlantic telegraph
Soothe his abysmal mind against her
Spleen, depression which maybe he caused? Did he
Juice against the Earth’s impending heat death
On those pelagic waves? Did finding ways to connect
With madness lick balm over his restless nerves?
He knew much about absolute zeros and mariner’s
Compasses, but more, that refrigerators
Cannot be perfect,
Nor can heat engines stop their bodies’ escape
Into colder cisterns, nothing wholly absorbed
From one to another, work sloughed off like
Sparks into cinerous sink.
Bad dream indeed! It continues. Oh, we must weep,
For we with everything around us
Are growing old, weakening, attenuating,
Every second, day by day, hour by hour, as he told us,
Despite the forests’ best efforts to convert sunlight
To sugar and from the factories of luminous chloroplast
To synthesize carbon to glucose. The oaks,
Our pure font of breath! Though they too, he told us,
Might die. Never had human finitude
Been so clearly illumined by science. Time-locked tragedy
Playing itself out on the stage of matter’s deterioration,
Hellish program written into the fabric of our physical
Being. Are we sober yet? Or is drunkenness
Our only anodyne? Hope, my friends, is
An open system, not one
Isolated from the salvation of surroundings, and
If we can’t see somehow, someday, our salvation there,
O maverick, tricked to tomb by an icy slip, we
Shall not find that access from S
That we desperately need. Our divine neighbor
Won’t come to purge our chaff and sloth,
Spurring us with resurrection to ignite our cells’
Vital souls, till nothing less than infinite
Shall burn, a fluent field
Of furnace that by supernatural powers shall
Singe us lastingly, with all
Completely convertible now!
But perhaps this is a concept of heaven, such endless
Resources and all consummately organized,
Utopia irrational yet peaceful
That will then drive us from inevitable frost
Into the supernal fires.
Oersted
Ah, but yes! The leonine Kantian can get scrubs
Grubby with facts, not just gloat incorporeal above us!
Can impose patterns on motions the way haruspix
Reads birdflight.
Steeped in wigs and Lutheran Bibles,
The uncritical sass of scholarship swept the Dane
South. In Paris, beardless Oersted
Swooned in Andronia’s acid arms,
And for beauty pressed matchless Thelycke to his lips
Like the sappy substance
She was, all dripping from Winterl’s figments
As from injured bark, an image the Gallic critics
Would mock. This friend of a namesake fabler,
Enthralled with Nature’s system, student of Schelling
And eccentric Ritter, stole back tailless to Viking soil,
There bent on repair of youthful reputation, for he was
Reckless with enthusiasm
And too hungry in consumption of
Fancied myths. Apothecary’s breed with pepper’s
Perfume plastered on pungent thumbs, he built
His galvanic trough, thinly wired with platina
Over covered glass, and to no amazement
Of audience, who could not see, he watched the incredible
Accident. On and off, Hans plied the switch, quick
Bursts of hot static burning like shaken bottles down the
Thin line, a pulsing jet of dynamic divinity more pure
Than god’s own eyes. As the current electrified the air,
Needle bowed to its maker.
O Copenhagen, how fortunate a place! Iron-rich
With idols and with what lodestones fortified
Under forests of the Real! These magnetic stones
Were unearthed by chance in your philosopher’s cave!
Compass needle, neither attracted nor repulsed by latent
Wirey charms, sprung sudden and infatuated
When with heat’s lusty sizzle
Her lithe body began to tremble. Livid and vital field
Of air appeared around her streaming glow, piqued
With Bacchus’ magnetic circles. Coulomb
Had said it imponderable. One force to another could not
Some conversion transform, two such different things
Like blade to cloud. Yet Oersted’s deflection showed
Anxious disturbance, distinct within the breast
Of amorous sliver. This would be his delicious revenge
On French foes. All hence a Unified Power,
As though borders had been transgressed, and in place
A saturous connection underlying some soon-to-be
Nation-state called Electro-Magneto.
Like newborn aluminum, this charged fuse set off
The explosive Vitruvian dreams of Ampere and Faraday,
Arago and Maxwell, who would build their best bridges
And aqueducts into that newly discovered realm.
Maxwell
He was the one to continue this fusion, and we
Must celebrate him fit for genius’ desk, for Einstein’s
Who remembered to give glory to this broad pate.
Not Newton, though he was there, but the Scottish swain,
Born of Gemini on India Street, linked over time like
Triplets to Yeats and Pessoa, devout Maxwell, boy shod
In tunic and homemade shoes, who showed up to school
From Galloway’s rustic hills with an accent
To make him bashful. This strange country lad
Drew curves with strings
Around his fellows, a poetry on streams and
Ovals. He blinked but not angry, so gold-hearted,
When his mates dubbed him “Daftie.” Who but the smartest
Can smile at that kind of smack, or can understand such
Flying mind, imaginings dextrous that swift-spun
Colored tops into white light, that swift-spun
Out into darkness
To stabilize the rings of Saturn, neither solid
Nor liquid, a vision Voyager confirmed years later?
From Trinity’s halls called to Aberdeen’s Marischal, he
Lectured to workers and married his helpmeet. Undying
His loyalty to her, holding her in pious arms shyly, the same
So avid to investigate all kinds of worlds. Already
Witnessed light’s elasticity, viewing through prisms the stressed
Gelatin that trapped changes like ancient insects fossilized
In glass. The story of insatiable curiosity speaks here
Through bouts of small pox, through whirling cells of
Flux and displacement currents up into the mist-covered
Mountains beyond senile Faraday, while medals piled up like
Dust to his credit. No one had reached the alps
Of those lofty equations. They surpassed so much
Comprehensible, Heaviside reduced to differentials that,
Stun beyond stun to our dumbness, slowly gathered
Unique observations into One. I see your mind floating,
O Maxwell, sniffing like hawk atop hurricane, where
Forces around charged particles of energy
Are spraying off scent of wild radiation like spoors
In spring breeze. They vacillate at velocities near light
In the whipped chamber of churning magnetism. Light,
You declared, like a god, is a quick wave,
Transversely undulates in oscillous fields of lumniferous
Aether. Oh, you had your own language, Sir Maxwell!
Thus in a fell swoop of knack, the three nations
Were fused into one.
Looked as if gathered colors were spliced,
Were melted together
In a glassblower’s glory hole. What pious operation,
O future church elder, did such witchcraft bend into you
As though pressing the surface of your brain into wisdom’s
Shape? To see the avatars of unlike phenomena as
Manifestations of the same was a mastermind trick
Fit of the oldies who merged three gods to singularity.
Another trinity of Science born, another
Ineffable miracle.
O blessed particle that takes multiple forms,
Where would we be without you! We’d be opaque as the
Scottish lake where monsters lurk, casting but sleek wakes
Across its mysterious waters. No special relativity would we
Know, no atomic structure, no quantum models. Is that
Not enough to signature genius and heroics?
Maxwell showed us how reference points change for
For moving observers, and shone tapers
Into the behaviors of gas molecules. No ape
Of Austrian Boltzmann, he discerned that heat
Is particle motion, more like a heart excited by
Ambiance than a waterfall, its kinetic soul
The faster the hotter,
And so restless as to become a demon.
Words cannot praise his work to deserved height, for
It breathes air too rare to articulate.
So carefully came
The edition of Cavendish in his old age, a labor of love
Like the first color photograph this world had
Ever seen. Sutton’s tartan ribbons he passed onto plates
Through chromatic filters. Who before this thought to bloom
Black and white image into hues? Can any peasant
Not smile at that demonstration? Now their flesh and hair and
Clothes, trees and dappled pets and vacation streams, these
Can whisk alive in their memory-books, radiant histories
With the tint of the Real! Life now captured in permanent
Rainbow freeze. This type of intuition and insight
Guides our reverent progress toward total
Oneness,
Toward absolute knowledge and (horrors!) manipulation.
I imagine we are going probably, we final scientists,
To a place where we’ll find ourselves
Standing in a glowing circle with those who had
Journeyed there faster, our hands wrung with the waiting
Mystics.
Einstein
Or can we be expected to understand, we common folk
Travelling like bewitched gypsy’s in our own
Relative subjectivities? Can we grasp the gymnastics
Dreamt by genius? Least of all yours, O Ulm-born Einstein,
Flexile shark of so famed visage. Your face
From the edit has kind drooping eyes, wild brows and
Hoary mustache, hair frizzed in raw madness icon,
A caricaturist’s fantasy!
We baste in your marinade now, child mystified
With invisible forces inside a compass,
Child whose powers of visualization surpassed Argus,
Honed by Talmud. So young, you galloped
Along beams of light
As though beside paradox. See, a fleet mustang
Beside frozen waves!
Before Planck, you were just a lonely boy
No one believed in, lost in Swiss flights, then boarded
To Munich to run Italian as draft-dodger, the unsacred
Pacificism already in your chest. Lacking hard-
Snapped confidence, French and chemistry, poor tutor
Of children since blocked by Weber’s cruel behest,
We knew you not. Ere your stint at patent where you
Swam in property’s oceans, part of the burlesque
Olympia. What happened to that child you had,
Illegal daughter of Novi Sad? Did she perish in
Scarlet fever, or did mother flick her away, offer
Her up, your Serbian Mileva’s sorry sacrifice?
Fated to dissolve in the lesser fog below your
Contemplations, mother and daughter faded. Well it is
To forget such personal tragedies, for
What are they compared to papers that sell for millions
During strife, or to thoughts that change the world,
Right?
I see you lost in solitude, soft symphony
Behind your ears, relaxed for the outpour from
Mind to paper where, eninked, the shady outlines
Of things mind-blowing bloomed. That’s you,
Delivering us miracles. That’s how
Photons first appeared, adumbrated sketches
More hazy than those proofs for atoms
Through Brownian waters.
I see you from converse with Besso
Poring over Newtonian violations. They glowered at you
Like mean thieves intent on battery, your effort
There like an omniscient angel
To reconcile the laws of mechanics with Maxwell’s
Fields, changing them, of course, in correction,
Emending the most valuable truths. The speed of light,
You taught us, is constant in any inertial frame, the same
No matter how fast a body moves. Time and space
Slows down, contracts as the observer
Observes. No one before you got how things
Get different at high speeds and in small distances.
Sure, nothing with mass can exceed the speed, but
With all this, you sang some special theory,
Writing it into the sands of knowledge, one more radical
Than family or citizenship, far past Poincare and Lorentz.
Their work hadn’t realized universality. Yes,
More than them, all Nature!
Then that most famous equation, basis of nuclear
Conversion where small mass to huge energy
By explosion goes BANG! This, the great equivalence
Of matter and energy that spoke from
Highest cloud: E = mc(2).
O what happened to space! Where did time go!
What shatterings resounded to the center
Of scientific understanding? It emerged like Leviathan
In the offing, the unity Space-Time our four
Dimensional world. Not many can claim discovering
Enigmas of dimensions, but now
What child today lacks this reference,
So fondly filling the Saturday cartoons like Newton’s
Earlier apple? Your life, Herr Professor, took off
Like blasted rocket,
Berne to Zurich, Prague to Berlin, Japan, then
As pope of physics in the Princeton Vatican, you were
Installed as a priest of Science, as the new Aaron
Leading the tabernacles across the desert
To promised land. Before you was a laureate scepter,
Hallowed of institutions you wished to despise,
But couldn’t. The Nazi backlash had burned
Your books, had hung you on magazines with paper
Rope around your neck, had sent out assassins, a crew of
Salivating Barabbas’ for bounty like the racists you
Denounced to DuBois. Who could blame you for
Running, defecting, renouncing your land in fear?
Yet you needed the general theory to clinch
That true fame you stumbled toward, the theory
That would erect your statue higher than Liberty’s
And would build the photo ops with Chaplin
On the Hollywood boardwalks. Needed it
To gain dialogue with Tagore, Bose and Freud.
All soaked it up as you stood at the podium like Zeus
To explain to the boondoggled how space is
Warped and how gravity’s field is the stretched
Relativity of some strong elusive
Force of unity. Its nature is the camber.
Gravity fell,
A mere excrescence of some deeper reality
In which the cloth of space-time could bend
In pleats like the lips of addicts and wormholes, could
Swerve like the indented surface
Of blackness or a mattress once a ball is tossed on it.
Gravity’s source, you declared,
Is the Curve of the All.
Mach, too, was toppled, the cosmic system
Now expanding or contracting, open and infinite
As Addington’s expedition confirmed. Yes, beautiful
Was your math of eclipse-deflected starlight
Our universe became a sheet of
Latticed atoms worked to frenzied oscillations by some
Spinozan magician.
Yet
How we change once we feel safe! That sad letter
To Roosevelt, what prompted that regrettable action?
Guess you feared German research and so pushed
To begin the race for the bomb. Your equation
Let loose chaos in Mexico’s desert, that project
Reeking of uranium, split atoms and chain
Reactions. Did you feel shame or horror
When earthquakes rocked those twin cities far away?
Far was this spirit from earlier days
Of manifestoes against mankind’s measles. To those roots
You would return with Russell to oppose,
But more than any, the dangerous effect of Science
Haunts this story. He who invents the method,
Cannot prevent the crime or stop that criminal coil of
Industrial use whose destruction rises out of
Pure, stubborn, childlike fascination. In the end,
You relinquished attacks on Bohr’s random electrons
Whose information travels faster than light, and
Maybe God does play dice with Earth’s inhabitants. If so,
What to do when craziness returns and missiles hail
In Vietnam, Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya.
But
To die with dignity is everyone’s just right,
Even yours, so
Working to the last, forgetful of a cousin once sexed,
As bones to ashes go, you went, leaving only
A brain that did so much for enlightenment and terror
Wrinkling in a jar of formaldehyde.
Hubble
How from unpretentious souls the worldview soars!
Goes away toward vanish, smaller to smaller
As from orange to grape to sunflower seed. Eventually
We will be speckles, a people of
Zeroes, close to a diminishing race whose last survivors surf
The snake of destiny as though on boards
In turfy backwash, taking them farther and farther out
To where they seek a new home, now from the beach
Just seeming dotted ghosts
Of remnant red on a blank tsunamic horizon.
From arched Western gateway
This gentle hero travelled north, young man
To Chi-town’s basic digs, athlete tall
Who to Rhodes raised himself as he had that jump that
Sailed over state champion’s pole. Varnished with calm
Politesse, he stood atop Mount Wilson’s scalp,
As below
Parades passed during sportive game, yet he was not
Seeing that, Hubble with an extensive
Eye, like spider’s web-line spat out into space. In that net,
Cepheid candles from Andromeda’s mawing cluster, teeth
Glittering too bright or too weak (which was it?)
To be less than fangsome horde. Innumerable,
To Shapley’s dismay, did he deduce
Those galaxies, from nebulae metamorphosed to
Numberless, not stars but oceans of stars.
Tuning fork
Held out, he twisted ellipses and spirals onto paper
As though roasting marshmallows over campfire, and
Began to count the kilometers
Between them all. Through Doppler velocities and spectra,
Signs of expansion, and BAM! That biggest bang
Was set on purchase! A foothold in space was as
Dark mystery
Separating, accelerating, galaxies moving faster
The farther apart they were, and Edwin left rued Einstein
With a constant blunder.
Pity those who perish
Under the horrible thrum of thrombosis. But entombed in