Poetry and physics #473

I’m an man of what Snow called ‘the two worlds’, meaning science and arts.  I worked as an astronomer; I publish poetry.  Both physics and the arts I’ve absorbed since I was old enough to read, so it’s inevitable that one of my volumes of poetry is Cosmic Impacts and another is The Passionate Astronomer.  The poem here is pure art, as far as I am concerned, and the physics reference is to me as relevant as somebody else’s sunset or landscape; just a part of life which naturally enters my poetry.

Convergence

Things combine to cause any event, whether a crash or a divorce.
We don’t see them coming until too late,
uncertainty rules, just as with Schroedinger’s cat.
Until Pandora’s box is opened what’s inside is mystery.
All unseen, little things and big converge until a resolution
which might be disastrous or desirable, unknown until
time’s river meanders to some decisive point
where in the shallows all is revealed.
There is another kind of convergence that I prefer,
“That skin, those curves, delicious sweet convergence
where thighs and belly meet, breasts part, hips swell,”
I once wrote, which seems so different, yet maybe not.
So many influences are working in my life,
and some are going to converge in changes
that I never anticipated, or hoped, or feared, might come.

© Malcolm Miller 8.1.2013

If the mention of Schroedinger’s cat, from quantum physics, turns you off, then you have turned your back on the world we live in, and perhaps even the universe itself, preferring to look inward in what may be only navel-gazing.  That’s how it seems to me.

I love the juxtaposition of the cat in its box with poison and Pandora’s box with its menacung contents.   This just popped into my head, as poetic ideas usually do.  The words about the river will suggest to those who know about quantum physics – the ‘collapse of the  probability function’, and what happens when we make an observation.

Poets use metaphor as a powerful key to unlock associations in readers’ minds which can be more meaningful than saying straight out what they mean.  In this way they promote a ‘meta-meaning’ in the reader.