Entropy in Three Poems
What I want to know is why we started out with a Big Bang and not a Big Mess
A Weathered Mountain Isn’t, Though It May Look Like, a Friend’s Face
Couldn’t half hear the guide over
the static, something about —
one plate can slip against
another, falling, but when —
dunes and the oil lamp sputtered
and sputtered but didn’t — Redwoods
have a sandy grain so that you’d
think the ocean — More ways to
make a mess, she said. My life
in a nutshell — means life and death.
The path up — bloodflow, sewage,
a salty air — refuse discharging.
Trash mountain. Don’t say
“hollowed out.” (“Blasted.”)
A Theory of Constellations
Captain’s Log (Stardate: ???). Every lightyear
you travel is another year before the sun
burns out. From Canis Major it may be an eye
of an undulating serpent: we do not know,
not yet. The nightbreeze dragging the canopy
as a boy tugs his sister’s hair, sodium
lights twinkled. Had some seminal matter
dragged a yoctosecond, some white-hot, primordial
stuff bubbled and yawned in the minutest
divergence from history, Gemini might
have wandered their separate ways, Castor carrying
Phoebe to some private nebula. Messages take longer
to reach base; some day, perhaps, the dove wings
out into blankness and never returns.
This Poem, Like Certain Fantasy Novels, Is Set On a Planet Beneath a Dying Sun
and not on the mere technicality that all suns
are dying suns. In the late autumn, children followed
their fathers to the mine, pulling red wagons
filled with leaves. There are deep shafts and
a child may fall a clean six seconds if dropped straight.
There are spumes in the ocean’s floor supporting
millennia of sulfurphages. In one of these novels,
the surviving few build a great pyramid and live miles
beneath its surface. In 1921, the mountains shield
workers from allotted bombs, bearing red blooms
on their broad backs, an angry red. The atmosphere,
after all, is no thicker than a human throat,
and the unplundered peaks, at last, accept
the bomb-like sun with nothing like anger.