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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?

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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?

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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.

Sadly, this Chuck D is a public enemy in some places, too.

The thermodynamic arrow of time has always interested me, both as a concept and a phrase. I wrote this syllabic poem last year, my first such attempt. Thanks to Huw Price for allowing me to use the epigram.

Image courtesy of Rush W. Dozier, Codes of Evolution – the Synaptic language Language revealing the Secrets of Matter, Life, and Thought, Crown Publishers Inc., New York, 1992.

William Can’t Tell

Late in the nineteenth century, on the shoulders of Maxwell, Boltzmann and many lesser giants, physicists saw that there is a deep puzzle behind the familiar phenomena described by the new science of thermodynamics. On the one hand, many such phenomena show a striking temporal bias. They are common in one temporal orientation, but rare or non-existent in reverse. On the other hand, the underlying laws of mechanics show no such temporal preference. If they allow a process in one direction, they also allow its temporal mirror image. Hence the puzzle: if the laws are so even-handed, why are the phenomema themselves so one-sided? — Huw Price, from The Thermodynamic Arrow: Puzzles and Pseudo-Puzzles

chaos does not lessen
along the arrow’s path

and time cannot be measured
by order or its absence

the arrow flies forever
no pressure no resistance

thermodynamism
beneath the lives of every

woman, man and baby
throughout this blind creation

there is no bow, no hunter
no target, no intention

Thanks to Bookninja for the link.

My good friend Kevin Baird sent me this link to Pharyngula’s collection of the Top 50 Evolution Myths.