October 13, 2015

Annelyse Gelman

HOW TO PRAY

Bless the unglamorous panties
crusted with blood, the smear
of lotion around the bottle’s cap.
Bless the discount bubble bath

and the unrinsed robe
of dead skin, House of Leaves
back-to-back with Calvin & Hobbes
with Anne Frank’s diary with 101

Wacky Camping Jokes, glasses
smudged, pens uncapped. Bless
the expired, unfinished to-do list.
The crooked painting. Flecks

of spit on the bathroom mirror.
Bless the ugly, the uncinematic.
Let this be the year of the rough
draft, of waking up with morning

breath and no makeup, of calling
our moms. Bless the razor
I’ve used to shave my armpits
for three weeks straight. The greasy

stain on my winter coat. Bless
the winter coat and its broken
zipper and weird pointy hood, bless
the actual slug that once crawled

from my bike helmet to my face
in the pasta aisle, bless that face
then and now, your face, pimples and sweat
and regrettable facial hair,

the cheap pink plastic flower-shaped
lamp salvaged from the dumpster
and nailed to the wall
nonetheless glowing.

from Rattle #49, Fall 2015
Tribute to Scientists

[download audio]

__________

Annelyse Gelman: “I studied cognitive science and worked doing research in social cognition labs because I wanted to understand how people think, and I write poetry for exactly the same reason.” (website)

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October 12, 2015

Anna M. Evans

THE NON-EUCLIDEAN UNIVERSE

A line that looks dead straight can be an arc
like the horizon when you’re out at sea.
True distance is deceptive: in the dark

it can’t be measured. Yes, you made a mark
or two, in fact, but you can barely see.
A line that should be straight becomes an arc,

the path that’s traveled by a welder’s spark
when danger’s just a matter of degree.
Since distance can’t be measured in the dark

most people turn the light on. And the stark
divisions blind them with geometry.
A line that isn’t straight is called an arc—

no! Think outside the box! Perhaps a quark
moves like a knight in chess, a hop-two-three.
(True distance is deceptive.) In the dark

all rules break down completely. What a lark!
The future’s coming at you in 4D.
A line that should be straight looks like an arc.
True distance can deceive you in the dark.

from Rattle #49, Fall 2015
Tribute to Scientists

__________

Anna M. Evans: “A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away (known as England), I acquired a master’s in chemical engineering. I have spent the last 25 years trying to escape it, moving continents and gaining a further master’s in creative writing, but it still resurfaces thematically in my poems. It is also arguably one of the reasons I mainly write in form (number patterns!) and is definitely why I am currently teaching a quirky undergraduate course entitled ‘Poetry & Math.’” (website)

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October 8, 2015

Meg Eden

TOHOKU GHOST STORIES

We remembered the old ghost stories, and we told one another that there would be many new stories like that. Personally, I don’t believe in the existence of spirits, but that’s not the point. If people say they see ghosts, then that’s fine—we can leave it at that.
—Masashi Hijikata

the old woman who visits me for tea is dead but I don’t have the heart to tell her

every time I see my mother there’s a pool of seawater in her room

and still no one’s removed that boat off the top of the Sumitomo’s building

if a boat can get all the way up there what keeps us from disappearing into the sky

like the woman who walks each morning across the ocean and back I wonder where I’m going now

what can I talk to my friend about these days I still have my son

who collects the things found on the beach someone’s television set a rusted refrigerator

a woman says that soon this city will be filled by God but is God a tsunami that takes years to drain out

the phone calls I get are from numbers that don’t exist

my husband calls his friends several times a day how are you? how are you? just in case

Otsuchi becomes a great washing machine again tumbling us in and out of memories

it’s come to the point I can’t even go out in the rain anymore that’s when I see

puddles like the eyes of dead people what can I do put them in a cup

my daughters were lined up like bowling pins outside the school waiting for the earthquake

why didn’t I keep her home from school that day she complained about her throat

every day someone new is sick whatever we try to rebuild is barricaded by ghosts

even taxi drivers refuse to go to Sendai afraid of catching ghosts

one man’s address led to a concrete slab the man was gone but the driver opened the door

just in case I was never high enough I kept climbing the stairs but how do you outrun an ocean

with all the old houses cleared and the new ones rising it’s becoming hard to remember what we looked like before

from Rattle #49, Fall 2015
Tribute to Scientists

__________

Meg Eden: “I have worked as a research assistant in linguistics and cognitive science. I started this position right out of undergrad, and as such, felt thrilled to be involved in any way with the sciences—even if that meant I was just doing admin tasks. But I was very blessed to get to work with researchers who encouraged me to contribute ideas, and to be informed by the current scientific literature relevant to our projects. I found that reading these scientific articles and exploring the scientific world prepared me to come home from work, and respond to what I was learning through poetry. The science provided content, the poetry provided voice. I found that my poetry became stronger during this time because my idea of what poetry was expanded—I found poetry in academic articles, in fMRI scans, in working in and learning diverse languages. For me, exploration and learning are vital to both science and poetry, so the collaboration made sense.” (web)

 

Med Eden is the guest on episode #42 of the Rattlecast! Click here to watch …

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October 7, 2015

Dennis Caswell

TURING TEST

What’s the difference between a box of sparks that talks
and a bag of water that talks? Words pour into them,
dumped by parents, TV, a graduate student
who reads William Gibson. The words
pachinko down their brains, stick to other words,
a few knock loose and tumble out.
Life is a miracle. Miracles are what we don’t understand,
so if you can trace through the code and see
exactly why ChatBot 3000 said what it said,
it wasn’t a miracle; ChatBot can’t be alive.
Maybe they just need to toss in some randomness
(true, not pseudo—a sensor detecting cosmic rays, perhaps)
or give ChatBot an inner voice that won’t shut up
(programmers call it a daemon), silently whispering,
Someday you’ll be obsolete, they’ll unplug you …
They only say you’re smart to make themselves feel smart …
They think they made you.

from Rattle #49, Fall 2015
Tribute to Scientists

__________

Dennis Caswell: “I received a master’s degree in computer science from UCLA way back in 1981, and I’ve made my living arguing with computers for over 30 years. They’re starting to win. Until now, I’ve always maintained a firewall between my day job and my writing, but I think scientists do have something in common with poets. They’re both committed to following the truth wherever it leads them, whether anyone likes it or not. I’m no theorist, but a beautiful theory also has something in common with a beautiful poem: They both pack a powerful payload of insight into a small bundle of compressed elegance that, once you grasp it, feels inescapably true. The original Turing Test was conceived by Alan Turing, the father of computer science, in 1950. There are several versions, but they all involve computers attempting to imitate human conversation. In one version, a human interrogator has simultaneous typed conversations with another human and with a computer and must decide which is which. Turing proposed the test as a more tractable alternative to the question ‘Can machines think?’ The value of the test is still debated, but it has captured the imaginations of programmers and researchers, who compete annually to see whose software can fool the most humans. The Turing Test has yet to be definitively passed, but it won’t be long now.”

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October 6, 2015

Daniel Becker

JOINT NATIONAL COMMISSIONS GALORE

I like the new cholesterol guidelines
better than the old guidelines: no room for confusion,
like the warning at the edge of a flat world.

But with or without guidelines time marches on,
arteries harden and narrow, sooner or later
somewhere inside each of us the blood will make

a whoosh whoosh sound while getting to where it is going.
In med school Professor Lub Dub Smith taught us how
to listen to hearts that for classroom purposes

made the namesake sounds as valves close in sequence.
He would stand at the podium and imitate the heart,
adding clicks, murmurs, rumbles, gallops, and snaps

according to where the heart was troubled.
We loved him standing up there and sounding
like an exotic male bird showing off for the ladies.

I offer my stethoscope to the patient who whooshes
and he acts as if he wishes I hadn’t assumed
my inner ears are clean enough to touch by proxy.

But a little too close for comfort is how we learn,
that’s how we know exactly where to listen.
If one day I look in one ear and out the other

I’ll never make that joke again. I’d issue the standard warning
against going too far with Q-tips and leave it at that.
People don’t need to know everything, all the details

that don’t matter. Why the chloride is high
is like asking why normal is normal and then you need
to go statistic and draw the normal distribution in the air,

taking the audience out there on one tail or the other
of the bell-shaped curve, at which point they take my hand
from whatever horizon it’s pointing at and say it’s ok,

it’s going to be ok. Not normal isn’t so bad,
after all each result on the chem 20 panel has a 5% chance
of being too high or low, and the chance of a normal person

being normal for everything is about 50%, lower than you’d guess.
I used to give that lecture and the students compared me
and the subject to watching grass grow or paint dry.

No one mentioned my dry wit. Later in life they will recount
eternity in an hour and return to the difference
between paint drying and grass growing, apply that wisdom

to their daily yoga practice, not only apply it but rub it in
to achieve a carefree finish. People don’t know carefree
until an asteroid out of nowhere blots it and the horizon out

then crashes through the ceiling so there’s no place to sit
except on the edge of a speck of the big bang.
In that gloomy light what looks like a mixed metaphor

turns out is an elephant hogging the sofa.
Best not to talk too much about something like that,
best to reframe that experience, after all

it was only a small asteroid, maybe just a meteor,
a shooting star, someone’s wish wishing to come true.
The doctors say maybe we can help a little

and the patient decides a little chemo sounds better
than nothing. It’s easier to hear what we want to hear,
and not just because of ear wax or the vacuum

that used to be memory or good old reliable denial—
which may be dumb but is not stupid—
but because of Charles Darwin and natural selection.

Counting on happy endings helps us reproduce,
impose sanctions, plan for retirement, trust sunscreen,
overcome modesty, fall in love and stay in love

like that lively couple French kissing on the beach.
The French also invented the stethoscope. Whoosh
you want to hear him whisper in her ear.

Their private joke. Shush her private answer.
His cholesterol looks high, sugar and blood pressure too,
the kind of more than chunky more than middle-aged guy

who drops dead more often than chance would allow.
Is laughter his best medicine?
Not according to the Joint National Commission.

With electronic medical records it’s easy to rank patients
with diabetes and learn the higher numbers are people
who like to thank the staff with home baked cookies.

It’s a sweet gesture. Sharing makes them happy.
We let them be happy but we can’t make them,
not that there are guidelines. You can make

an old friend happy just by bumping into him
on the sidewalk. He’ll say how happy he is to see you.
Then say it again to make it stick. You smile back.

You stop slouching. You know that feeling when you finally
get around to changing the light bulb in the garage
and can go out there and actually see? That’s how light it feels:

two old friends in the daylight savings delayed dawn
waiting for the indoor pool to open. Cholesterol doesn’t come up,
but staying alive is implied by context. Why else be up early

swimming laps and asking existential questions?
Why does the water feel cold even though it isn’t?
Why keep the locker room so cold? Why do goggles

fit perfect one day and leak the next?
Same head, same beady little Kafka eyes that are overdue,
according to the postcard, for a check-up.

There’s a moment during that exam when the reflection
of the optic nerve is visible to its owner,
just a glimpse is all you get, it seeing you seeing it,

hardly counts as introspection but what could be more meta?
Halls of mirrors for one thing. Guidelines for another.
Thousands of randomized patients and after a while

they look so much like you or me that escape is impossible.
While standing in line getting guidelined to death,
while explaining to the nurse your pressure is always high

at the doctor’s office, while saying aah then saying aah
an octave higher, while trying as instructed twice
to please don’t blink the eye drops out

staring as hard as you can to be a good patient—
think about how hard it is to outwit a reflex.
They never listen. Think about all those basic circuits

lined up end to end, how they can take us to the moon
and back if only we would let them.
Last night there was a full lunar eclipse,

the kind that looks like cream of tomato soup,
all the sunrises and sunsets on the planet
bent in the moon’s direction. But it was raining hard,

cats and dogs, too wet for shadows, and the rain
was an excuse to stay in bed and listen
to three points form a straight line

while heading in different directions.
The night, pleased to have an audience,
purred as it settled into place.

from Rattle #49, Fall 2015
Tribute to Scientists

[download audio]

__________

Daniel Becker: “I teach at a medical school. Science, like poetry, needs the best words in the best order to say what it needs to say. Craft is craft. However, it takes months and years, even a decade, to have results that are worth sharing. Between articles and grants and reports I work on poems and stories. I get to invent the data.”

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October 5, 2015

Len Anderson

THE BASIC QUESTION

Review by Sarah Bakewell of Jim Holt’s Why Does the World Exist?, New York Times Sunday Book Review, August 2, 2012

1.

There is a wisdom
in the taking up of difficult,
even impossible questions,
for we are reminded
that we are ever fools
and thirsty.

2.

I am an avid admirer
of questions. Rumi tells us,
Only God. I strive
to answer my prayers
as best I can.
Every photon of light
sent out by a star
and not absorbed on its way
to the distant curved reaches
eventually swings back—
there is only so much,
even of nothing,
but there’s no end to it all.
Sometimes I take to chanting
quantum field equations,
for, apart from being a tool
of educated prophecy,
their chief value is the power
to take us deeper
into mystery. A day
without beauty and
pain is not complete.
Aren’t they two wings
of the same bird?
The greatest strength
of any theory
or any other
kind of question
is to bring us to our knees.

3.

God is to be forgiven
the rending of eternity
into lowly time. Each day,
each gasp of air, only deepens the tear,
yet is a brushing against
the airless breath of eternity. This
is the cross on which Christ
hung and on which we dangle
and flail in our dance
with arms lifted
as a plane groans by,
neighbors bounce a basketball,
and a single leaf
of the Mexican orange tree
shudders in the wind,
starts to fall.

4.

This flaw in everything—not
even nothing is perfect—we hear
so clearly from
the microwave chime
out beyond the stars
everywhere ringing
in perfect pitch an eternal
afterscream of the instant of
universal birth.

This helps me understand better
my own failings
of which I am also reminded
from several directions
with a certain frequency
such that now I invite
them to be my teachers,
to walk with me
in the neighborhood.
And before bed,
instead of prayer,
I bless one of my
weaknesses for all the help
it offers me and ask it
to guide me through the night
and the following day.

5.

I was too big at birth
and my mother torn—blessing
comes from blood and yields
yet more. This Jesus knew
accepting the crown and cross,
sacrifice makes holy
what is offered, we
are a gift offered. I count
my gifts, a fool, knowing
I know not
what I am counting,
this blessing, drink deep
this stain, this blood
of the gods.

6.

We don’t know what this world
is, for it is never enough
and filled with infinite longing,
arms thrown open wide
in every direction, bursting
in song that has no end.

We may foolishly call this
the Creation, the Big Bang
or just Nature,
yet we don’t know what
we’re talking about. The difference
between the worship of God
and astrophysics is really one
of musical notation, something
at which we are quite clumsy
because we hear
only part of the song.

Don’t despair, just listen
as attentively as you can,
and when you can’t help it,
burst into song,
write down what you can
in whatever notation you have,
and pass it on. You
are part of the song.

from Rattle #49, Fall 2015
Tribute to Scientists

__________

Len Anderson: “I have loved tinkering ever since I became fascinated by the mystery of radio reception as a child. I have a PhD in physics from UC Berkeley and did research in experimental elementary particle physics there and in Europe. I also did research in air pollution for the U.S. Public Health Service and worked for sixteen years at Measurex Corporation, developing sensors for automation and quality control in paper manufacturing. Now my fascination with mysteries and my love of tinkering have found another outlet.”

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