What They're Talking About

I have an amateur familiarity with physics in the last seven years 
or so. 
I like thinking how space should unfold itself 
to gestate and disseminate 
the contents of stars.

I'm of the simple, perhaps amateur, opinion 
that every virus, every egg, every 
nail and tooth and claw and neurotransmitter 
began in their supposedly 
incalculable glow. 

Plus, of course, the wisely impersonal drift of planets. 
Our own being the first (and so far the last) to call the name of Shiva. 
(Don't let deranged optimists persuade you: their educations have 
made them fearful and desperate.) Planets named for 
gods of war and loving harmony, without footprints, 
seemingly without thoughts of any kind. 

(And further are colossal assemblies
of ancient water molecules neglected
by the previous ring of gravity.) 

(And further are colossal assemblies 
of ancient debris that hardly sticks 
to anything.) 

I have an amateur familiarity with physics. I don't 
see myself teaching...or taking...any professionally guided 
courses any time soon. There's an embarrassment of riches 
in the form of terminology, with a dire absence 
of what it should fucking indicate.

Are the best minds of that field either so content 
or so hopeless to abandon plain coherence 
in their pursuit of the smallest, necessary bones of existence? 
Who really wants to wait in line behind the man 
(or woman or they for that matter) who waits behind another 
who waits behind another and another 
to see substance decay and evaporate into another dissatisfying answer? 

Sisyphus would cringe with righteous contempt. 
Sisyphus never had a microscope or heard 
the early promises of Darwin. But what he felt 
in his hands 
had descended from those stars, 
not lazy hyperbolia that confuses the tongue & the eye. 

....I've been at this desk for seven years, longer, since 
at least the confirmation of the Higgs Boson, in 
many rooms, in many cities, with mostly the same 
skeleton... And I hope I'll be here yet 
when some of my elders admit to reality 
they don't know what they're talking about. 

****