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.
Sea Word Sonnets
Sea
smells
from
afar
bring
memories:
mangroved
mud,
salt
marsh,
crabs,
shrimp,
flashing
fins.
Sea
grapes,
cabbage
palms,
phlox,
morning
glories,
spider
lilies,
hot
sand:
this
is
home.
Sea
shells:
like
life,
most
beautiful
in
pieces.
Here,
have
a
piece
of
me!
Sea
breezes
waft
salty
caresses
across
my
face.
But
dark
clouds
promise
rougher
weather.
2022
Little Gasparilla Island
Miles up the crumbling asphalt
I smell the mangroved mud perfume
whispering of mullet, crabs and shrimp
and fish – lord, the fish!
Agile snapper, snook and reds;
Cat- and ladyfish galore.
My fingers tighten on remembered reels.
The boat trip to the Island
wets my face with saline spray.
It dries in the scents of sea grape and palm,
floating in atop a zest of salt
from ever-restless surf shouting
over and over “I am here!”
So am I.
Never so much elsewhere.
2022
Leap!
Atop a jetty rock I stand,
fragile flyrod in my hand,
trying to ignore the surge
that breaks to spray me on the verge.
I need to climb still further out
to cast, but I am filled with doubt:
I hesitate in fear — I freeze
and tremble in the ocean breeze.
Am I too old, my balance lost?
And if I fall, how great the cost?
Is this how I will kick the bucket?
What the hell, I’m fishing! Fuck it!
3 March 2020 originally
After Life
You always thought you would die and then
be resurrected to live again.
Or you lost someone you loved so much
you invented Heaven to stay in touch.
Or you simply refused to believe your soul
could just disappear down some black hole.
Or maybe you chose to believe that spark
would go with your body into the dark.
Or that all your joyous exhilaration
was only part of a simulation.
All wrong. All right. All misconceived.
It matters not what you believed.
It matters not which part you played
in the personal universe you made
from which to learn, with which to touch
the other gods you missed so much.
28 March 2021
More Physics Haiku
Recently I attended a meeting of the CIfAR Quantum Materials program. It was nice to see the old gang and all the new kids! 😉 Naturally, perverse inspiration struck again…
Iron selenium:
Yes, we have some bananas
in the QPI.
de Haas – van Alphen
without a Fermi surface?
Well, it oscillates!
What’s a pseudogap?
We don’t know, but we can see
them in everything!
In between the sheets
of strontium titanate
it’s interesting.
Unsurprisingly,
quantum oscillations are
everywhere we look.
I don’t understand,
but I use the words as if
I knew their meaning.
The Experiment
The Physicist, a lovestruck knight
comports himself with honour
at the tournament Experiment
in hope that Lady Nature,
lovely, chaste, mysterious maiden,
charmed by his heroic deeds,
will twirl with delight and let her gown
slip open briefly to reveal
a glimpse of breast or flash of thigh.
The Chemist is a rogue who cares
only for schemes
to get into the lady’s pants.
The Engineer’s already down
on one knee proposing marriage
and the raising of bright
industrious children
who will make their parents rich.
The Biologist catalogues these
examples of courtship behaviour
while the Psychologist smiles knowingly
and the Philosopher is, of course,
above all this nonsense.
2016
Seductions
The magnanimous animus selects,
smiles in our hearts, gently
parts the inner lips of intellect
and plunges us through each
the other’s oceanic experience.
Minds are chaste and wanton, always open,
wishing to be entered and filled,
to fill and enter and bring forth,
godlike, creations of light.
1989
Sigh Star Sigh
The physicist at the
black
board
talks of “sigh star sigh”
adding probabilities.
un-
less
we learn to think
both sides of a thought
all
space
fills with chalk marks
and the stars
may well
sigh.
1966 or so?
Black Hole
I tried to light the emptiness
a dozen billion years;
I’m tired of burning now.
My incandescence dies.
Out of the changes in my heart
neutrinos rise and swarm,
preparing to carry away
my will to be warm.
They fly.
I im
plode
folding down upon myself
like a detonated building
more inward than imagination.
I am the id of the universe,
black hole,
the cosmic drain
sucking in suns and dust.
I am the singularity
that must and yet cannot exist.
Under the great gulp
umbrella, my event horizon,
none are seen again.
Photons like panicked bugs
on a four-dimensional balloon
rush to escape with their entropy.
They forget:
every direction in my field
is back
to
black hole.
(1974 or so)
Big Bang
In nothingness
the ur-point explodes
mattering violently
shattering vacuum into spaces.
Suns plummet incessantly away,
spacetime swirls into temporary planets,
order
is hurled into entropy.
Occasionally
carbon cools and catches atoms,
forges chains and rings in chaos —
then the double helix forms,
a local departure from the Laws;
fingers grow to write these words
and vanish.
(1974 or so)