two haiku (stone #35)

Posted 4 February, 2011 in Haiku, My poems, Poetry, Science

Listen to these poems using the player above.

/ / /

salty dream
awaken to the chime
…sit

/ / /

deoxy-
ribonucleic acid:
me

Tracking the global population explosion

Posted 2 January, 2011 in Politics & Activism, Science

(via Sociological Images.)

POEM: Fun with science

Posted 27 September, 2010 in Audio Poems, My poems, Poetry, Science

Listen to this song using the player above.

Fun with science

You are my superheated ball of gas
        in the center of the solar system
My only superheated ball of gas
        in the center of the solar system
You cause endorphins to be released
        into my brain
When the refractive properties of water in the air
        are overcome by cloud cover
You’ll never know, dear, how much certain
        visual, olfactory and auditory cues
        suggest you as a suitable mate
Please don’t remove my superheated ball of gas
        in the center of the solar system

POEM: This is the end

Posted 17 May, 2010 in Audio Poems, My poems, Poetry, Science

Listen to this poem using the player above.

This is the end

this is the end, so settle in

grab a bottled water

recline in your easy chair

do people still have easy chairs?

from the east-facing window

you should be able to see it coming

sweeping across the hills like

an angry sunrise, devouring

even now, when it’s far too late

many people insist it’s not real

a chimera created from the plots

of summer blockbusters by the

pocket protector crowd

because they can’t get dates

how could something so innocuous –

something that dimpled Dave

on Channel 11 uses smiley-faced suns

to explain to Ma and Pa Kettle –

possibly cause us any harm?

are we not men? have we not

mastered the universe, or at least

our small outpost within it?

POEM: Gingerbread Man

Posted 21 April, 2010 in Audio Poems, My poems, Poetry, Science

Listen to this post using the player above.

Gingerbread Man

“I’m uncertain,” said Heisenberg.
It was true — he was hard to pin down.
You have to get up
pretty early in the morning
to catch a man
traveling 66,000 miles per hour.
To meet him halfway is a challenge;
the distance always shrinking,
never quite closing.
We are, finally, unknowable.
Not fixed in both position
and velocity, evading
capture, measurement, taxonomy.
What’s in a name? And where? And when?
Heisenberg printed a label in neat
block letters, but could find
nowhere to put it. All his photos
were blurry. He could not
recognize the faces.
Who is the nucleus, who the electron?
Who is the fixed point, who
the orbiting satellite?

POEM: Creeley’s Balloon

Posted 13 February, 2010 in Audio Poems, My poems, Poetry, Science

Listen to this poem by pressing the play button above.

Written on a lazy afternoon while overdosing on the poetry of Robert Creeley.

Creeley’s Balloon

Why can’t we feel the Earth going around the sun?
Why can’t we feel the world spinning?
I tiptoe on squeaky floors so as not to wake my son,
while the cat sleeps on his back under two sheets of paper.
Now I’m in bed, listening to a love song by an old Nazi
and reading Creeley, most of which I don’t understand.
On the cover of the book he’s grinning,
spent cigarette in his lips, hat on the back of his head.
I think he’s in a hot-air balloon, somewhere
over the western desert.
What is lighter than air?
What is heavier than sorrow?
Faded in the background, a mesa,
above it, a cloud,
captured by the lens for just that one moment.
Who snapped the photograph?
Who is the other passenger?
“It was at those times that I carried you.”
I used to find that so comforting
until I realized that “those times”
call for us to plant our own feet in the sand,
on this shifting ground that is spinning, whirling
around a sun in a galaxy
that is itself spinning
in a universe
that is growing into something we cannot explain.

And yet

there is Creeley, now long gone,
in his hot-air balloon, smiling at me,
and I tiptoe to the bathroom, and my son stirs.

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