Stepping out of the meeting,
our spinning energy of a week’s workshop
slowing, I watch the white breath of the snow
lift into mist, erase the mountains
the sound of a train threads the clouds,
bearing logs or oil out of hearing
all week we have been listening to the echoes
of numbers, one hundred ways to prove cubic roots
tucking laser-cut spirals into globes
imagining hypercubes
assembled by pairs, parenthetically
reminded that every opening must have its closing
computed the relative risk
of being the victim of a mass shooting
or catastrophe in an old pine forest
the dynamics of a heart attack
the mist that rises becomes the cloud descending
sometimes we forget the mountains
Art Information
- “thinstringtwist” © Niels Langeveld; used by permission.
Robin Chapman is author of eight books of poetry, including the collaboration Images of a Complex World: The Art and Poetry of Chaos (World Scientific), with her poems and physicist J. C. Sprott's fractal images and explanations; and the eelgrass meadow and One Hundred White Pelicans, poems of climate change from Tebot Bach. A ninth book, Six True Things, about her childhood in the Manhattan Project town of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, is forthcoming from Tebot Bach in 2016.
