March 13: Friday the 13th, Darrell Bourque, "Physics Report"

It is Friday the 13th.  It's actually the second straight Friday the 13th in as many months.  I had a pretty crappy day at work, being forced to do things that I wasn't hired to do.  I left at the end of the day with a huge headache and an even huger bad mood.

I'm doing a little better now.  I'm still trying to reclaim a little happiness.  Maybe by the time Jimmy Fallon comes on tonight, I may be in the mood to watch him write his weekly "thank you" notes.  I have a bathroom to clean and carpets to vacuum before then.

Saint Marty is ready for a poem and a drink.

Physics Report

by:  Darrell Bourque

It is the end of the lovebug season here in south Louisiana.
We are taking teflon-wrapped sponges
to our windshields and to the bumpers
of our cars.
In northern New Zealand a mountain top blows. The ash takes with it a lake.
The water no longer identifiable
or measurable as what it was,
a deep blue bowl in thin air.
I know more than nothing about Lorenz’s initial condition effect
on weather systems theory.
I know more than nothing about
energy field physics,
but I like the idea of poets calibrating
the energy in the lines of what they make
and scientists getting out their calipers
to measure the fat content in images.
In Miss Dixie Wynn’s sixth hour class just last week the testosterone levels, she says, were unchartable.
It was as if some Cajun blonde Medusa had turned
this boy-filled class to charged stone.
Empirically speaking, three weeks after
the beginning of the fall term
Elizabeth Broussard’s schedule changed.
Ben Bernard wrote an essay
on a person who most influenced him
and he wrote about his uncle
he works with.
He said his uncle was teaching him a trade.
That it was more than learning how to be a cabinet maker.
It was about how to smooth surfaces
and how to make angles fit.
It was about how to make things
strong so that no one ever noticed
how strong a thing was.
It was about dovetails and miter boxes.
And then he said it was, too,
about how his uncle was teaching him
how to be a good father and a good husband,
and he didn’t know where that last thing came from
and he wondered what connections, if any,
all that had to do with what Miss Dixie had been saying
one day about something that sounded foreign to him
that you couldn’t do when you write,
and then something about writing
having to be about you and having to be true
and it seemed to him that this line in his essay
about a father and husband was both of these things
and besides that he didn’t know why
he kept seeing Elizabeth about to turn
around in his writing-log entries.
Her long blonde hair moving.
Her turning her face to him.
Her eyes the color of deep mountain lake water.
Him, some father, some husband
swimming in them.
Just before he closes his eyes for the last time Hokusai releases thirty-six variations of each of his Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji.
This morning at the edge of the pine grove near the emperor’s retreat the mist barely touches
the tops of the boulders in the garden.
The caretaker is raking the gravel.
The imperial embroiderers are taking notes
on the pinks in the peonies blooming.
A hummingbird near the rim of the Atchafalaya Basin is making its way to the red mallows,
the subscription in its wings,
Kyoto, Kyoto, Kyoto
the hurried aria its heart sings
yokuboo, yokuboo, yokuboo 

 

I dare you to make me laugh