Gravity: A Love Story

Gravity: A Love Story
by Gideon Burton

Attraction, bodies, falling -- and a force
one can defy but nothing can resist.
The pining moon, she loves the earth, of course,
and tides will moonward move as though to kiss.
What is that secret substance: matter, mass,
that static stays and yet exerts its draw
upon all other matter, either vast
or microscopic? Gravity is law,
and yet is irresistible, as though
its firm inertia were a godly love,
no matter all the crushing deadly blows.
It knows the depths, full measured from above.
     I sink in grave compression on the ground,
     and muse upon this pebble I have found.

Photo: flickr - katiew

Alchemical Romance

Alchemical Romance
by Gideon Burton

Dark transformations of the primal matter:
through water, air, through fire and through earth,
from lead to tin to silver, up a ladder,
through mercury, iron, copper -- golden birth.
Much more than metal: archetypes and glyphs,
or aqua vitae from alembic stills,
hepatis liquor with its mystic whiffs --
experiment's arcane and cosmic thrills.
From blackness, primal matter, chaos wild,
the yin and yang of substances to jar;
according to the cosmic Emerald Tile
comes quicksilver through roasting cinnabar.
     With secrets alchemists help nature's pace:
     while she perfects in slowness; they, in haste.

Photo: flickr - Chemical Heritage Foundation

Before Newton

Before Newton
by Gideon Burton

Before we knew the measuring, before
the calculus of gravity, when mass
was celebrated, not inert, when more
was known through silent mysteries unasked--
The cosmos turned along the axis, earth,
the sable silent ether held the stars,
which smiled or frowned at every human birth,
and few there were who dared to pause and parse.
Astronomers have architected breadth
and depth, unclasped the boundaries of space,
and to old verities have handed death,
with dust and radiation in their place.
     How easily the heavens lost their grasp
     When little man thought he was big to ask.

Photo: flickr - Lynn (Gracie's mom)

Rockets

Rockets
by Gideon Burton

The airy tissue of the island clouds
unweaves, collides, then weaves itself again
until an erring kite or plane unshrouds
the azure arch of afternoon, dark span
of thickest oxygen that bleeds into
the black escape of emptiness and time,
beyond the curve of indigo and blue.
The rockets, metal-girded, eager, primed
to pierce both atmospheres and ignorance
attack the waiting sky with trailing flame,
igniting some small part of earth, their chance
to measure sunbeams, or give stars their names.
     A ribbon girds our planet, tightly held,
     yet some escape, like roaring redwoods felled.

Feel free to copy, imitate, remix, or redistribute this poem as long as you give proper acknowledgment of authorship. Photo: flickr - colinjcampbell.

Interpreting Chest X-rays

So, I received notice about a new book just out on the subject of interpreting chest X-rays. This ad was academic publisher spam. I'm in the humanities, for crying out loud! And yet, the cover of the book intrigued me aesthetically. It isn't often that you see orange and mauve backlighting the rib cage.:

It turns out there is a whole cottage industry of X-ray art. I love when science and art collide. This is why I'm so interested by information aesthetics and data art. But this book interested me for another reason. As an English professor I've been in the interpretation business for a long time. I wondered, what are the hermeneutical hurdles of other fields? And with something as inherently, literally fuzzy as X-rays, could I find in radiology a kinship with the anxieties of analysis that fuel so many discussions of art and literature? So I glanced at the table of contents.

And there it was, listed under Chapter 7 (on lung tumours), shining like a pearl swept up onto the sand by a friendly tide: "The solitary pulmonary nodule." Now, that might mean nothing to you (and semantically, it certainly meant nothing to me); but for someone who has a keen eye out for found pentameters (examples of iambic pentameter occurring unconsciously in the wild), this was pay dirt. Can you just hear that rhythm? Who cares what it means? That rhythm just sings: "the SOL i TAR y PUL mon AR y NOD ule." Now, purists will note that there is an extra, 11th syllable, unaccented at the end of the line. But that only paves the way for a feminine rhyme (...I'm thinking, "module"?) and has been perfectly acceptable in sonnets (Shakespeare's sonnet #20 is silly with them)

Well, when one is writing a sonnet a day, a found pentameter is pretty much akin to a sign from the heavens. That's when I knew that I must explore the dark art of X-ray interpretation for my sonnet today.  (The image that follows is a chest X-ray that I overlapped with a Rorschach ink blot image to try to suggest the mystery of this sort of interpretation.)

Interpreting Chest X-rays
by Gideon Burton

Ignore the ribs, the diaphragm, the spine--
they orient our looking but distract.
Assess the lung expansion, any line
across the lobes? One part may have collapsed.
Now look for masses, lesions, cavities
for pleural thickening or asthma's signs.
Has emphysema left no travesties?
That does not set aside pneumonia's kind.
No diagonistic radiographer,
I hesitate with certainty to say,
but technically one is the soul's biographer
who tells the tales unveiled in chest X-rays.
     A solitary pulmonary nodule?
     Perhaps, but science darkly blurs its modules.
    
Feel free to copy, imitate, remix, or redistribute this poem as long as you give proper acknowledgment of authorship.

Numbers

Numbers
by Gideon Burton

Of all the numbers counted even, odd,
or dark within the scale of fractions dense
along the endless integers, the flawed
eternities of primes whose great expanse
is random-scattered, patchy, pure, across
the exponential wilderness -- I wish
I had one multiplier without loss,
nor subject to divisions poorly rich.
With such I would such mathematics yield
for you, you’d wonder what remainder stayed,
what algorithms algebra concealed
obscure that might have freer play.
     While others crack their chalk in mute despair,
     These nimble number symbols root my square.


Feel free to copy, imitate, remix, or redistribute this poem as long as you give proper acknowledgment of authorship. Photo: flickr - dullhunk