A Comet Unnoticed

Comets have long been portents of change. They challenge the rote repetition of our skies. An astute observer of the sky will perhaps have recently noticed a new object in the sky, a comet, present for the last few weeks (you would have had to look east just before sunrise near the star Spica). This was the comet ISON. But comet ISON, having strayed too close to the Sun, has been mostly annihilated. If there is a comet in the sky and no one sees it, was it ever really there?  

William Carlos William's poem, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, captures the essence of comet ISON's elusive journey around the Sun. Brueghel, the Felmish Renaissance painter, carefully recorded the event like a faithful astronomer, but the worker is not keen on the sky and Icarus goes wholly unnoticed. It is just the same to the worker, for had they noticed Icarus or not it would likely make no difference to their toils in the field. And similarly ISON went largely unnoticed.

According to Brueghel
when Icarus fell
it was spring

a farmer was ploughing
his field
the whole pageantry

of the year was
awake tingling
with itself

sweating in the sun
that melted
the wings' wax

unsignificantly
off the coast
there was

a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning

ISON made a brief appearance to the unaided eye for a few days before it grazed the sun and then uncoiled itself. But to the learned astronomer ISON is still interesting. Comets are rare objects in the inner solar system so even a dead comet is a chance to learn something, in fact, further spectroscopic observations of this dead comet's remains will continue to tell us exactly what it was made of. There is a legacy here.

I am a contributor over at 3 Quarks Daily now so you can read the rest of the story of this lost comet over there...

Turtles all the way down

The beginning was heralded by an elephant's trumpet.

The universe is carried on the back of an ancient turtle.

There were once ten suns embodied by crows. All but one crow was shot by an archer.

The moon is a decapitated head. Her face is painted with bells.

The stars are your ancestors eyes worth remembering.

In time you too will have nine tails and be older and wiser.

All the things which you do not know are vague. Drift clouds.

Having come so far is a matter of vagueness.

I wrote this poem because even modern cosmology faces infinite regression paradoxes with respect to the initial impetus of the Universe. The various creation stories independently formed in different cultures create some stunning mental images for me. The funniest idea for me is that the Universe is resting on the back of a giant turtle. What is the turtle resting on? Why it is turtles all the way down. Oh, and I almost forgot the best blog posts always have a picture; here is a picture of a turtle.

Inside a Nuclear Reactor

A poem from Poor Mojo's Almanac(k):

Inside a Nuclear Reactor
by Alice Mullen

Whole lives begin and end
in a thousandth
of a thousandth
of a thousandth of a second.
creation
grief
love
fury
sorrow
and death,
all occur in infinitesimal portions.

Protons give sentimental tokens
to one another,
through dancing electrons,
spinning in joyful abandon
to the music of quark logic.

Schrödinger's symphony builds to a cacophony.
Rhythm breaks down to decay the choreography.

Neutrons, split apart—with the grief of separation grow cynical.
Unstable and paranoid they guard their neutrinos from others.

Resentment and regret grow exponentially;
to radiate outward,
seeping into the ground water.

To Hold The Sky

Invictus

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

A Dream

In a deserted place in Iran there is a not very tall stone tower that has neither door nor window. In the only room (with a dirt floor and shaped like a circle) there is a wooden table and a bench. In that circular cell, a man who looks like me is writing in letters I cannot understand a long poem about a man who in another circular cell is writing a poem about a man who in another circular cell . . . The process never ends and no one will be able to read what the prisoners write.

A Dream by Jorge Luis Borges (Translated, from the Spanish, by Suzanne Jill Levine.)

En un desierto lugar del Irán hay una no muy alta torre de piedra, sin puerta ni ventana. En la única habitación (cuyo piso es de tierra y que tiene la forma del círculo) hay una mesa de madera y un banco. En esa celda circular, un hombre que se parece a mí escribe en caracteres que no comprendo un largo poema sobre un hombre que en otra celda circular escribe un poema sobre un hombre que en otra celda circular . . . El proceso no tiene fin y nadie podrá leer lo que los prisioneros escriben.
Un Sueño por Jorge Luis Borges

This is just to say

A poem inspired by William Carlos.

I can not
detect you dark matter
save your influence
on gravity

and neutrinos
I don't care
for the way you pass
through my hands

You and neutrinos
deserve each other
when cosmology ends
keep your secrets