Category: POETRY
Again, look up “poem” in the dictionary if you don’t recognize the word. Or, better yet, just have a look at what’s here and form your own impressions.
The Swamp
I enter quick,
Rabbit-scared of the dry sticks,
Crackling reeds and weeds, once-watered sedge;
Dry fear, dangerous, eats at the swamp’s crisp edge.
With the muddening of the earth
My scampering softens to a slink;
Lungs reach tenderly to touch the humus stink,
Shrink, but stay; I give dead stumps less berth.
Gracefully crawling now by scummy pools,
I hide in spidery grasses, feel small fishes
Nibbling like persistent wishes;
Softly at first the swamp asserts its rules.
Insects, intermittent frog-falls intersperse
The silence; alligator calls now echo low.
Coiled and bead-eyed, I need not rehearse
The slither or the strike — for now I know
The serpent’s still-imperfect marriage; more,
That even this fearless moccasin form of man
Pays obeisance to the land.
All’s as before.
Trinity Review – 1967
Public Image
Now
Deep in the muddled reaches of
Nearly landlocked inlet tide
Rises in dark a desolate verdant mountain,
Mangrove-ringed, a peak of motionless pine;
Buoyed on the salt-sweet oyster-studded mud, its speech
Whip-poor-wills peacefully through the night,
Whispers the substance is not in sight.
Bathed in the carbon light that leers from the human beach,
Effigy island inverted, admired in wine:
Eyes give symmetry to the greenery fountain
Seeming to flow from just inside
Itself — the whip-poor-will tells with love
How.
Trinity Review – 1967
Middlemen
The pilot of the droning plane above cannot conceive
the lazy summer sound his craft’s exploding pistons leave
to swim through waves of warmth to us, who, watching far below,
in turn cannot conceive the kinesthesia he must know.
Sit and listen, how the swimmers splash across the lake;
they can never step away and hear the sounds they make,
and so are only singing, never listen to the song.
The dead can stand detached, but cannot live through life along
with swimmers, pilots, all: the superficial and the rest,
who feel life’s essence; we, apart but feeling, can know best
their vices and their virtues — climbing hopes and crawling fears;
our power to observe outweighs the retrospect of years.
Things which cannot feel themselves are also in our view:
Tin roofs dulled with rust, a live oak’s mottled shade, a hue
of sunset’s autumn: such as these we add to our wide store
of feelings and appraisals, which, combined, make something more.
Trinity Review – 1965
untitled
Each Spring the lesson sinks in once again:
I cannot be a man if I admit
to always being what I’ve always been.
By the end of every Summer, I forget.
Written in about 1961, IIRC
The Dash
Then, when the uniform was new
and muscles flowering in the flesh —
when exultation thrusted you
into and through the bursting dash,
there was the handle. Your easy hand
took it in stride, the green baton,
rushed it through the cinder land
and finishing, eagerly passed it on.
There was a second verse but I can’t dredge it up from memory. This was written around 1962 or 1963.
Here’s the beginning of a new second verse, composed on 11 Feb 2019:
Now, as the decades take their toll,
your strength remains, but your speed has flown.
Endurance fades, but your will is whole
and the joy of striving still your own.
Assorted Haiku
unnoticed, while we cry for
all the little ones.
From a sea-blue sky
a brown bolt of eagle strikes:
death among flowers.
Clear intention shows
that what you think will happen
tends to be what does.
Only this end — that
dead men write no histories —
justifies the means.
I’m deconstructing
hermeneutics… Oh my dog!
What am I saying?
Moonset
I leave you sleeping warm and ride
into the cold night, my eyes
hurt by headlights on windshield frost.
Looking up through the now clear glass
I see the quotidian Earth reach up
and swallow a perfect harvest Moon.
All day its magic hides behind
the Sun’s commercial, rational glare,
but dusk relights the candles of the Moon
rising to lift magic back into the air
and bring me home to you.
– written to Pat some Winter day, probably ca. 2007 or so.
Physics Haiku
One of my habits during long meetings (particularly those of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research [CIfAR] Quantum Materials program, where my brain’s digestive capacity was frequently exceeded) was to write haiku about the speaker’s topic and/or my own state of mind. Here are a few.
ARPES
photons knock me out,
leave behind the energy
you would like to know.
while I was a part
of the copper oxide plane
I was d-wave dressed.
quasiparticles
leave behind the signature
of what they once were.
U AND Δ
Band theory fails
so we turn to “chemistry”:
localized ions.
Review your atoms.
U and Δ both depend
on which orbitals.
And U and Δ
choose a Mott insulator
or Zhang-Rice singlets.
Doing it all right
gives t’ small and suggests
a t-J model.
Spin waves almost work,
give the peak in PES;
2D spinons next!
QUESTIONS?
Who is this heckler?
I’d listen to George in this
even if he’s wrong.
Dope a Hubbard chain:
the spectral weight is transferred
from high to low E.
All you ego freaks
please save your sniping speeches
until we are gone.
Fermi surface? No.
It’s not a metal! Maybe
there’s a “Shen surface”.
It’s hard enough to
follow what the speaker says
sans “annotations”.
HAMILTONIANS
We can write down H
but we can’t find solutions
every solid knows.
“The deeper reason why there are metals is, there just are.”
We think we know all.
Then Nature throws us a curve
and we retrofit.
“The dogs that did nothing in the night:” La4BaCu5O15
EELS and optics show
MIR scenario:
interlayer hops!
Stomach full, my brain
loses the battle for blood;
eyes will not focus.
Out come the big guns:
Every talk is Laughlin’s talk.
Isn’t he a gas?
“Shoulders of giants” –
standing room for everyone –
Maybe they should shrug.
COHERENCE, DECOHERENCE & STRONGLY INTERACTING FERMIONS
Yo’ algorithm
Gotta be ergodic if
ya want convergence.
Calculating E,
run the WORM internally;
Green’s function “for free”!
Here come ol’ flattop, he come groovin’ up slowly…
Use the Principle
of Emergent Symmetry,
old states of matter.
THE NEST OF HORRIBLE PHONONS
Falling into the
nest of horrible phonons,
resonance is lost.
The neutron arrives,
knocks on the crystal door and
leaves a gift of spin.
An electron lost
its spin to one mode and its
charge to another.
What you cannot see
is not necessarily
something that’s not there.
The tiniest wire
must suffer more than its share
of decoherence.
d-wave junctions make
spontaneous currents flow:
butterfly qubits!
I’ll make it smaller;
wonderful devices if
you make it super.
Josephson junctions
of grains in a normal sea
are not what we see.
Holes in a layer
make an organic crystal
anything you want.
I’m a fermion
who transports charge but not heat.
What the hell am I?
Whorls in the current
come in quantized flux units
hc/q.
60K Tc
mediated by phonons?
This cannot be!
Put in a muon;
something averts its spin, though
you leave it alone.
Holes like to be paired
for the same reason spinons
enjoy being paired.
Let’s get together
with lots of other couples
and make a ladder!
ODD BITS
FQHE and
Fractionalization
are too hard for me.
Priorities are:
renewal; gender balance;
my guy needs a job.
What was “Gossamer
Superconductivity”
now is QPT.
Dr. KAON’s Koan
A poem written by Jess H. Brewer on the occasion of
Erich W. Vogt’s retirement party, 31 March 1994.
Born on the prairies in TRIUMF tradition,
the second of six Vogt family additions,
Erich soon showed that he loved competition,
conceived an interest in nuclear fission
and set out to overcome all opposition.
Erich took leave of his fair Manitoba
for Princeton, where he’s now a Department prober.
Perhaps his dignity still must recover
from a party to celebrate school being over,
the only time he’s been seen not sober.
Through Birmingham he continued his story
to Chalk River National Laboratory,
where Erich pursued the implacable quarry
of knowledge, while stocking his inventory
of children and accolades solemn and hoary.
Vice President Erich, we were shown,
had a will of iron, not a heart of stone.
He treated the UBC tribe like his own,
but that student reporter should have known
his position on sensitive issues was “prone.”
Despite this penchant for un-P.C. quips,
he was offered the TRIUMF Directorship.
As Erich accepted, he made one more slip:
“This is only for five years – read my lips!”
(Not counting, of course, the time spent on trips.)
In fact, Erich stayed for “two terms and a while”
as the KAON proposal passed trial after trial.
Through political intrigues like Penrose tiles,
we learned to love Erich’s management style:
“Come in with a worry, go out with a smile!”
And thus with his vision we all were infected,
and all to KAON became connected.
Oh what a relief, to be briefly protected
from “realist’s” sad, morose and dejected
predictions that KAON would soon be rejected.
They were right, I guess – KAON finally fell,
but defeat is no shame in a battle fought well.
It was wise of the bureaucrats not to tell
Erich Vogt they wouldn’t build KAON ’till Hell
froze over; we’d freeze it!
(And there they could dwell.)
–
Tomorrow we start with a brand new boss:
Alan Astbury is his name.
He’ll have to rewrite the rules of the game
to build new victories out of our loss.
If Alan intends to avoid any anguish,
he’ll remember our birthdays, every one,
the names of our spouses, daughters and sons,
and cheerful greetings in every language.
But one thing I’m sure he will freely confess:
he must learn to lean out of his office and yell,
“VOGT!!!” with the requisite decibels
or pay for conventional public address.
Water Haiku
across the Earth’s crust; reward
yearnings of the Moon.
Falling forever
frozen to a distant Sun;
gas tail all alight.
Wet specks merge and stick,
relax into bigger bags
and fall, jiggling.
Clear spheres drag apart
the colours from white and send
circles to centre.
Love is to be cool
water in the hot, dry throat,
wash away dead dust.
Rebecca
She merges, slowly blinking Buddha,
into a less wise world. God bless
the revelation in her eyes
and open them again for her
if ever magic hides.
Written on the occasion of our daughter’s birth at Seibo Byoin Hospital in Tokyo, 15:16 local time, Japan, May 4, 1983.
The Computerization of John B.
(Apologies to Robert Service)
A poem written on the occasion of John B. Warren’s retirement party.
John Warren was a great physicist, a good friend and a nice man. The world is less for his passing. This poem was written for his official retirement from UBC around 1980, a few years after his retirement as the first Director of TRIUMF due to a heart attack. He retired reluctantly, devoting much attention to the production of apples on his farm in the Okanagon but returning to TRIUMF periodically to remind us of what we were supposed to be doing, until his death years later. I miss his advice.
There are strange things seen at a big machine
by the men who moil for muons.
The various factions have interactions
that would make quarks spit out gluons.
The Meson Hall lights have seen queer sights,
but the queerest they ever did see
was that night by the beam of M13
when I computerized John B.
Now, John was raised in the ancient days
when computers were only a dream.
The numbers he’d pack on an envelope’s back
were astonishing! . . . so it now seems.
When microprocessors became our oppressors
and FORTRAN IV-plus was invented,
he thought of the lot as a mechanist plot
to drive J.B. Warren demented.
One midnight our team was taking beam
and fitting the data on line.
The computer was busy! The noise made us dizzy
as it hummed and beeped and whined.
If we opened our door then the Meson Hall roar
assaulted our sanity.
It wasn’t much fun, but the only one
who didn’t compute was John B.
Later that night as we stood packed tight
’round a rack of defunct nucleonics,
the oscilloscope screen cast a glow of green
on the tangle of wires and ‘lectronics.
He turned to me and, “Jess,” said he,
“I’ll retire next year, I guess,
and if I do, I wonder if you
might consider the following request:
“When I move to my farm, it would do you no harm,
and is even dictated by prudence,
that you should enhance the effects of your grants
by looking after my students.
It’s not my displacement, it’s the thought of replacement
by a computer that ruins my day.
So I want you to swear that, foul or fair,
you’ll maintain my PHA.”
Now, a colleague’s neurosis is fine in small doses,
but this was a wholesale batch.
So I promised that night to preserve pulse height
off-line techniques, with one catch:
I made John swear this burden to bear:
that he’d program the PDP
to pick and to happily polish each apple
that grows on the trees of J.B.