Half-Finished Bridge
No important work to do today, I think,
as I lie in the hammock one last time
before storing it for winter,
just a few chores around the yard—
deck chairs to be stacked and stashed away
and the lawn raked despite the pears
and oaks hanging on to their green.
Stamped on the pencil I’m using,
first snow falling on the half-finished bridge,
now as in Bashō’s time,
the halfway done possibly a road
to nowhere, like the wars we shouldn’t start
and the marriages we can’t finish.
But he must’ve meant that I find myself
amidst the season’s first flurries,
leaves collecting at my feet
as I rock in the wind, writing to my father
that I’m grateful he’s still alive
and there’s time to erect the rest of the trestle
and walk together to the other side,
light snow falling on our backs.
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In Spring, Mathematics are Yellow
I’m sure there’s something fractal
in forsythia, not so much its chaotic sprays,
which are probably not parabolic curves
(and certainly not catenaries
hanging under the weight of blossoms),
but the contours of the bush, branch and flower
that are shaped like a year in my life
or its day or hour. Up close, I can see
each bloom has four petals, thus proving
the limits of Fibonacci’s reach,
his long arm able to paint five
on the pansies I potted for my wife, but not
across the street where our neighbor buried
perennial memories of his wife ten years ago.
How odd never to have seen the daffodils
as hexagrams before. They die too soon,
unlike the dandelions that dot my yard—
too many to fight, yet finite, unlikely Fibonacci,
though undoubtedly fractal (or so Mandelbrot
would claim), always inappropriate
for bouquets of reconciliation, firmly rooted
in the life of my lawn, while the lawn of my life
goes to seed faster than an exponential plot,
and all the quantized fluff
tunnels into next year’s plans, like it or not.
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Richter 7.8
Dark energy and dark matter describe proposed solutions
to as yet unresolved gravitational phenomena. So far as
we know, the two are distinct.
—Robert Caldwell, cosmologist
SciAm.com, August 28, 2006
Such a waste to spend a life thinking
about the impossible to figure out, like where the spirit
goes when detached from its body.
An alternate universe perhaps. That’s where
dark matter enters, not how physicists hypothesize,
but the way it casts light on everyday affairs.
I, for one, am stuck on the question
of how dark matter and energy can be separate and distinct
when plain mass and energy are equivalent.
We’re told we need both types of darkness
to fill what’s missing, yet one pulls us together
while the other propels us apart.
What we can’t find in our world must be
the substance of another,
worlds that look to each other for what’s missing,
each a resting place for the other’s souls,
an answer to why any god would allow a quake
to bury nine hundred children under a school,
what’s so incomprehensible here on earth
maybe making sense in the place where all those students
have found new flesh to wear.
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In Confidence
Why does leaning on the rail of a deck
and looking out over layers of hills
as buds burst through their coverings
evoke the big questions? Like why
are we making such a mess of it all?
Ask Sunday’s dissonant choir of birds
in the newspaper’s Week in Review,
always a replay of the same
failures. Lots of cartoons there
to remind us that making fun of ourselves
is a start but not an end. Take today—
though it could be any day—
a young girl with a bow in her hair
asking her bald-headed ex-VP granddad
to teach her new dog a trick,
so he grasps the pup by its scruff,
and pours a glass of water down its throat
while screaming, “Speak! Speak!”
I know we should, but it’s so hard
to feel tortured out here
watching the oak unfold its leaves.
Besides, waterboarding sounds like
an amusement park ride,
what you might do with your kids
at Typhoon Lagoon. I know I would
give up secrets. That’s why
you should never trust me with one,
though I must admit
that your brief affair with a colleague
will always be safe with me.
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Slaying Philistines
When we are no longer children,
we are already dead.
— Constantin Brancusi
Perhaps it’s a story of happenstance
that begins with a village carpenter
and ends with a master in his dusty atelier,
always the unschooled shepherd
who harbors no ambitions
to lead an army, but dreams
of a magical bird, the mythical Maiastra
lifting him to perch with her
on a boulder at the edge of space
where they’ll cajole a falcon’s wings to stillness
and wax them with the sun,
or perhaps it’s about a boy’s hunger
to mold a piece of goat cheese,
whittle branches into wands, massage shavings
between his thumb and fingers, rub toes
against a stream’s smooth stones,
for how else can you explain
an old man hunched over
a rhombic block of marble, carving
plainsong into crescendo, chiseling away
the husk, struggling
to liberate a creature’s spirit?
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