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                2.  Turns Among Many

Harmonice mundi

The scans and dots enhance these other worlds,
   the red rock plains of Mars, the red spun reel
of Jupiter, the brash and crystal wheels
   of Saturn, all the moons, their pocks and swirls,
blue ice and hot volcanic curls,
   the planets' clouds and what the clouds conceal
and what the rifts and surfaces reveal
   to Voyagers, the silver spiders hurled
a billion miles and still a part of Earth
   since what they signal to their place of birth
reminds me what the tantrum world might mean
   and makes me happier for having seen
in pampered safety here, from by TV,
   a vision of the gorgeous harmony.

                                Nov 1980

Entropy

Parting pairs
   and states betray
the patterns of the holy.

Even the stars
   on course decay
although, of course,

   more slowly.

                                Jul 1982

Cosmologists

   "The radiation from the early universe should
    by now have expanded to such an extent that its
    temperature has dropped to as low as about 3 K."

1.  There's no one ranks them for audacity.
     They say the world, well-loaded point in wait,
        blew up one day and spewed out t (time), s (space)
        and then a slew of spiral galaxies.

      I bow before their wild ability
        to theorize and slickly calculate
        the birth of stars from quantum states
        and other wonders leading up to me.

      But I sometimes think how pleasant it would be
        if they could find behind the background haze
        some acts more touching than the lepton phase ---
        a song, perhaps, or notes on perfidy,
        an ancient pas de deux, a family tree
        with portraits of the causes of 3 K.

2.  Swift origin:  a singularity
        exploded to expanding time and space
        and from excited quantum states created
        our spun light, the spiral galaxies.

     So bow before the probabilities
        that turned the universe from early rays
        into an older world in which we brave
        and which we chalk with strange cosmologies,

     and though I think how pleasant it would be
        if we could find within the background haze
        a past more touching than the lepton phase,
        still, theories too contain a poetry.
        Though crabbed equations lack humanity,
        they glorify the genesis of blaze.

                                Sep, Oct 1981; Aug 1982

We Also Swerve

        "If the atoms did not have this swerve,
         they would all fall straight down
         through the deep void like drops of rain . . .
         Thus Nature would never have created anything."
                                                Lucretius

This is a world with convictions
    in spite of hesitant hands.
Though faith fail to furnish prescriptions
    the trees swallow rivers and stand.

This is a world with conditions
    in spite of plangent desires.
The world has its circular missions
    and we are its tangents to fire.

                                Jun, Jul 1982


Thinking Time

    "And the source of coming-to-be for existing things is that into
    which destruction, too, happens, 'according to necessity; for they
    pay penalty and retribution to each other for their injustice
    according to the assessment of Time' . . . "
                Anaximander, 6th century B.C., containing the earliest
                words known today of any Greek philosopher

The air our ash, the earth our solemn bones
    the sea our cold remains, the elements
        demand a payment for our chance offense,
            due when our culminating act atones
for our epiphany, that threat to stones.
    attack on space and matter's eminence
        made by burgeoning intelligence
            that no materiality condones.

Or are they thinking too, the stones, the seas,
    the restless atoms, quarks, the elements
        of elements, our thoughts, our very thoughts
alive and thinking thoughts of thoughts like these
    but all consigned to such impermanence
        and recompense as trying Time allots?

                                Feb, Mar 1979


Darwin's Music

Disciples of Pythagoras report
    a music made by bodies as they move.

When Newton, plagued by time, tuned in his muse,
    he manufactured theories for the chords.

    "And ...  whilst this planet has gone cycling on
    according to the fixed law of gravity,
    from so simple a beginning endless forms
    most beautiful and most wonderful have been
    and are being evolved."  (These are the final
    words of Darwin's Origin of Species.)

The worms and plants of Darwin's tangled earth
    and other forms produce a music too,
        and protein codes are scores that carry tunes
            for protean performances of birth.

                                Apr, Aug, Oct 1981


Evolution

On just one day, a single turn of earth,
    some unknown millions of years ago,
the first dicotyledon must have grown,
    and every spring the earth salutes its birth.
No one can know the shade tree as it was,
    whole types are gone whose grace no longer grows.
A random few have left their shapes in stones,
    the rest have disappeared, as living does.

The patterns stay which fit the changes most.
    The last dicotyledon may ascend
        one day, and shade trees never grow again.
Time makes the most insistent matter ghosts
    but nothing time controls will bring an end
        to beauty in the patterns which have been.

                                Apr, Aug 1981


Life on Earth

I may make do with having been    
    an instance of profusion,
my species one of many,
    not framed so colorful as some ornate varieties,
and less at home, although
    adept, at times, at saying so.

                                Jan, Mar 1982

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