I’ve been thinking about the Greeks and their science, as I try to pull together a chapbook of poems on themes related to Archimedes and his lever. Archimedes is not the only Greek scientist who intrigues me. Aristotle is one whom I like first for his ideas on rhetoric, still the basis of many classifications on that subject, but also for the ideas described in the middle stanza of the following poem.
The Search for Order
The ancient model,
in polished brass, expressed
proportions undisturbed
by motion. Harmonic
spheres keep turning.
Had the world such music
there would be no static
on the FM radio.
Aristotle understood:
the world beneath
the moon is set apart
from celestial, perfectly
governed spheres.
We are the spoiled core
of an ideal cosmos,
its worm-eaten pit.
Aristotle stood at
the center. My universe
runs away at light speed,
while beneath me tectonic
plates shift, collide.
I long for balance: spheres
encircling the stillness
of mere decay.
The idea that the ground beneath our feet is unstable is not new. I grew up in California, where earthquakes are a fact of life. I used that as an image in an earlier poem:
Fire At The Center
My mother came home
from a course on personality
with a slip of paper:
“Your dominant emotion
is rage.” She went on being good
and dull as plowed dirt.
Where is sure footing
when ground shifts?
The San Andreas fault
did not run under the house,
but whether it lay east
or west I could not say.
Which way would the earth tilt?
When she muttered
“Death and transfiguration!”
I heard a danger
no “Damn!” could hold.
The fluid at her core
lay ready, like crayon
melting under an iron,
to stain us both. Her fire
never broke the surface.
And I? The astrologer
finds Mars at the nadir,
“fire in the depth of your being.”
Eighteen years we spent
adjacent, distanced
by unacknowledged fire.
It is safer not to ask
where the fault lies.
In this poem, the shifting ground is largely metaphoric. Although I knew about earthquakes, it was more an idea than experience: I only recall one small quake from my childhood. I missed the big ones that later toppled the Oakland freeway and broke the walls of my cousins’ home in the mountains. My awareness of shifting ground was not in the body.
By the time I wrote “The Search for Order” I was in a more unsteady place psychologically, a more mature understanding of grounding and groundlessness.
I decided this was a theme worth exploring further.
“The Search for Order” was published in Bibliophilos, which has published several of my poems on Greek themes.
“Fire at the Center,” first appeared in Metis, August, 1995, and is included in my chapbook, Accidents, described on the Books page.
freethoughtandmetaphor 