Science for Poets • Steve Plummer
Science for Poets I: Cosmology
shows thermodynamically,
that time has an arrow.
The milk stays spilled,
but the slap wakes us still,
and endlessly.
Entropy, you see,
promises interminably
to set us free—
from the big hand.
Science for Poets II: Biology
Driven to the Dance
The alarm of life, the young docs say:
not momma-guilt in a one hoss shay,
just an aimless drive down the DNA —
every turn impossibly neat,
until the final twist, snipped off at birth.
While wayside creatures kill fair, to eat,
we knowing beasts, on the scent of mirth,
touch tongues with fate in the rumble seat.
Then allemande left, do-si-do
winds straight out from the radio.
One bare heel tapping, gut to toe,
fate calls the reel, and round we go,
careening past defeated chance.
Driven to the dance.
Science for Poets III: Meteorology
Hurricane
Water dreads rising
unfaithful from gravity’s bed.
She denies the moon’s playful tugs.
But she will never resist
the breath of a brooding storm
on her face.
Every tempest in another doomed lover,
all swirling heat and rising vigor,
drawing her up, whipping her high—
rubbing ecstatic to the white release
when two hundred million volts
burn the arcs to ground.
Cooling, she falls away
to muddy the cracked bowl clean
and steal again to gravity’s
groggy embrace.
Science for Poets IV: Psychology
Under the Pont-au-Double
Giving it up that night,
wet on the greening stone,
I heard the river’s claim
to my balance of time
and her promise to carry
the past downstream
to the very ocean,
far enough, cold enough.
Then I glimpsed the child
that our cruel nature calls
to these encounters;
he was fleeing the bloated remains,
his innocence welled up
but leaking out
in every tear.
