and an untoward faith in the eye/I pun.
II. The Photographs
ARGUMENT: The pictures speak for themselves. A cycle of growth, mating, and birth. The coarse dots, calligraphic and abstract, become faces, with troubled expressions. Distance improves vision. Lost time sifts through these immutable old screens.
III. The Dance of the Solids
ARGUMENT: In stanzas associated with allegory the actual atomic structure of solids unfolds. Metals, Ceramics, and Polymers. The conduction of heat, electricity, and light; nonsymmetry and magnetism. Solidity emerges as intricate and giddy.
All things are Atoms: Earth and Water, Air
And Fire, all, Democritus foretold.
Swiss Paracelsus, in’s alchemic lair,
Saw Sulphur, Salt, and Mercury unfold
Amid Millennial hopes of faking Gold.
Lavoisier dethroned Phlogiston; then
Molecular Analysis made bold
Forays into the gases: Hydrogen
Stood naked in the dazzled sight of Learned Men.
The Solid State, however, kept its grains
Of Microstructure coarsely veiled until
X-ray diffraction pierced the Crystal Planes
That roofed the giddy Dance, the taut Quadrille
Where Silicon and Carbon Atoms will
Link Valencies, four-figured, hand in hand
With common Ions and Rare Earths to fill
The lattices of Matter, Salt or Sand,
With tiny Excitations, quantitively grand.
The Metals, lustrous Monarchs of the Cave,
Are ductile and conductive and opaque
Because each Atom generously gave
Its own Electrons to a mutual Stake,
A Pool that acts as Bond. The Ions take
The stacking shape of Spheres, and slip and flow
When pressed or dented; thusly Metals make
A better Paper Clip than a Window,
Are vulnerable to Shear, and, heated, brightly glow.
Ceramic, muddy Queen of Human Arts,
First served as simple Stone. Feldspar supplied
Crude Clay; and Rubies, Porcelain, and Quartz
Came each to light. Aluminum Oxide
Is typical—a Metal close-allied
With Oxygen ionically; no free
Electrons form a lubricating tide,
Hence, Empresslike, Ceramics tend to be
Resistant, porous, brittle, and refractory.
Prince Glass, Ceramic’s son, though crystal-clear,
Is no wise crystalline. The fond Voyeur
And Narcissist alike devoutly peer
Into Disorder, the Disorderer
Being Covalent Bondings that prefer
Prolonged Viscosity and spread loose nets
Photons slip through. The average Polymer
Enjoys a Glassy state, but cools, forgets
To slump, and clouds in closely patterned Minuets.
The Polymers, those giant Molecules,
Like Starch and Polyoxymethylene,
Flesh out, as protein Serfs and plastic Fools,
This Kingdom with Life’s Stuff. Our time has seen
The synthesis of Polyisoprene
And many cross-linked Helixes unknown
To Robert Hooke; but each primordial Bean
Knew Cellulose by heart. Nature alone
Of Collagen and Apatite compounded Bone.
What happens in these Lattices when Heat
Transports Vibrations through a solid mass?
T = 3Nk is much too neat;
A rigid Crystal’s not a fluid Gas.
Debye in 1912 proposed Elas-
Tic Waves called phonons that obey Max Planck’s
E = hv. Though amorphous Glass,
Umklapp Switchbacks, and Isotopes play Pranks
Upon his Formulae, Debye deserves warm Thanks.
Electroconductivity depends
On Free Electrons: in Germanium
A touch of Arsenic liberates; in blends
Like Nickel Oxide, Ohms thwart Current. From
Pure Copper threads to wads of Chewing Gum
Resistance varies hugely. Cold and Light
As well as “doping” modify the sum
Of Fermi levels, Ion scatter, site
Proximity, and other Factors recondite.
Textbooks and Heaven only are Ideal;
Solidity is an imperfect state.
Within the cracked and dislocated Real
Nonstoichiometric Crystals dominate.
Stray Atoms sully and precipitate;
Strange holes, excitons, wander loose; because
Of Dangling Bonds, a chemical Substrate
Corrodes and catalyzes—surface Flaws
Help Epitaxial Growth to fix adsorptive claws.
White Sunlight, Newton saw, is not so pure;
A Spectrum bared the Rainbow to his view.
Each Element absorbs its signature:
Go add a negative Electron to
Potassium Chloride; it turns deep blue,
As Chromium incarnadines Sapphire.
Wavelengths, absorbed, are reëmitted through
Fluorescence, Phosphorescence, and the higher
Intensities that deadly Laser Beams require.
Magnetic Atoms, such as Iron, keep
Unpaired Electrons in their middle shell,
Each one a spinning Magnet that would leap
The Bloch Walls whereat antiparallel
Domains converge. Diffuse Material
Becomes Magnetic when another Field
Aligns domains, like Seaweed in a swell.
How nicely Microscopic Forces yield,
In Units growing visible, the World we wield!
IV. The Play of Memory
ARGUMENT: The poet remembers and addresses those he has loved. Certain equations emerge from the welter, in which Walt Whitman swims. Arrows urge us on. Imagery from Canto II returns, enlarged. Sonnet to his father. Conception as climax of pointillism theme.
memory of girl—worker for McCarthy—came to our door—zaftig—lent her my wife’s bathing suit—she pinned it—she was smaller than my wife—pinned it to fit—the house upstairs hushed—velvety sense of summer dust—she came down—we went to beach—talked politics lying on pebbles—her skin so pale—bra too big so the curve of her breast was revealed nearly to the nipple—“If he ever got any real power it’d ruin him for me”—pebbles hurt her young skin—we came home—she took shower—should have offered to wash her back—passing me on the way to the bathroom—skin—dawn-colored skin—eyes avoided—eye/I—I should have offered to wash her back—dressed in her own cool clothes, she handed me back the bathing suit, unpinned again—lovely skin of her arms untanned from a summer of campaigning by telephone—strange cool nerve taking a shower in married man’s wifeless home—the velvety summer dust waiting to be stirred, to be loved, by the fan—left her by South Green—“You’ll be all right”—“Oh sure”—girls hitch-hike now—a silk-skinned harem drifting through this conscience-stricken nation
You who used to swing on the pavilion rafters
�
� showing me your underpants
you with whom I came six times in one night
back from St. Thomas sunburned
in my haste to return
my skin peeling from my chest like steamed wallpaper
my prick toward morning a battered miracle
of response
and your good mouth wetter than any warm washrag
and the walk afterwards toward the Park
past Doubleday’s packed with my books
your fucked-out insides airy in your smile
and my manner a proud boy’s
after some stunt
did you know you were showing me your underpants?
did you know they said you laid
beneath the pines by the poorhouse dam?
and in the Algonquin you
in the persimmon nightie just down to your pussy
and your air of distraction
your profile harassed against the anonymous wall
that sudden stooping kiss
a butterfly on my glans
your head beat like a wing on the pillow
your whimper in the car
you wiped blood from me with a Kleenex
by the big abandoned barn I never drive past
without suffering
you who outran me at fox-in-the-morning
whom I caught on the steps of the Fogg
the late games of Botticelli
you in your bed Ann in hers
and the way we would walk to the window
overlooking the bird sanctuary
our hands cool on each other’s genitals
have you forgotten?
we always exuded better sex than we had
should I have offered to wash your back?
you whose breast I soaped
and you my cock, and your cunt
indivisible from the lather and huge as a purse and the mirror
giving us back ourselves
I said look because we were so beautiful and
you said “we’re very ordinary”
and in the Caribbean the night you knelt
to be taken from behind and we were entangled
with the mosquito netting
and in the woods you let me hold your breasts
your lipstick all flecked
the twigs dissolved in the sky above and I jerked off
driving home alone one-handed
singing of you
you
who demurely clenched
your thighs and came and might have snapped my neck
you who nursed me
and fed me dreams of Manhattan in the cloudy living room
and rubbed my sore chest with VapoRub
and betrayed me with my father
and laughed it off
and betrayed me with your husband
and laughed it off
and betrayed me beneath the pines
and never knew I thought I knew
your underpants were ghostly gray and now
you wear them beneath your nightie
and shy from my hug
pubescent
my daughter
who when I twirled you and would not stop bit my leg
on West Thirteenth Street
your profile distracted against the sand
your hips a table
holding a single treat
your breasts hors d’oeuvres
you fed me tomatoes until I vomited
because you wanted me to grow and you
said my writing was “a waste” about “terrible people”
and tried to call me down from the tree
for fear I’d fall
and sat outside nodding while I did toidy
because I was afraid of ghosts
and said to me “the great thing about us is
you’re sure of the things I’m unsure about and
I’m sure of the things you’re unsure about”
and you blamed yourself for my colds
and my skin and my gnawing panic to excel, you
walked with me on Penn Street
I think of you and mirrors:
the one that hung in the front hall
murky and flyspecked and sideways
and the little round one with which you
conducted arcane examinations by the bedside
I lying on the bed and not daring
look over the edge
I was a child and as an infant
I had cracked this mirror in a tantrum
it had a crack
it was a crack
“O I am wonderful!
I cannot tell how my ankles bend”
“The smallest spro
ut shows
there is really no death”
“And the pismire is equally perfect,
and a grain of sand,
and the egg of the wren”
“What is commonest, cheapest,
nearest, easiest, is Me”
“his eyes shut and a bird flying below us he was shy all the same I liked him like that moaning I made him blush a little when I got over him that way when I unbuttoned him and took his out and drew back the skin it had a kind of eye in it”
Q.E.D.
and you who sat
and so beautifully listened
your gray hair limpid and tense like a forest pool
“nor whence the cause of my faintest wish”
listened as I too effortlessly talked
after putting on my glasses
(you called them my “magic eyes”)
shielding my genitals (remember
the Cocteau movie where he slashes an egg?
not to mention poor Gloucester’s
“vile jelly”)
talked but never explicit anent sex
“shy all the same”
trying to wheedle your love
and after months and years
you pronounced at last:
I said, “how sad if true”
staggering out past the next patient