poems

Will Anderson 

Elegy for Entropy

The second law of thermodynamics:

            a closed system’s entropy will not decrease.

I’ve never been much good at pool or physics,

            but here’s the quick and dirty: using quantum computing

a team of Russian and U.S. scientists observed one electron

            which for a fraction of a second reversed its entropy—

like breaking a billiard table where the balls scatter, reverse direction,

            rerack with an unclattering, all the numbers and colors together

and scattered out again, falling apart

like a student who bursts into tears before he can walk into my classroom,

            caught in the rack, a love triangle—

and in the winter on my way from morning duty

            I see him glowering and ask him how he is.

“Not so good. Mr. Anderson,” he says.

            What do you do then? What is teenage angst? What is existential?

I tell him to hang in there, feel useless

            and at the end of the day I go downstairs to the guidance office

 to upload professional development documents,

            see more sheriff deputies than usual,

and sit in an office as the counselor tells me what has happened.

            I hear my student and his mom through the wall, crying.

I’m trapped, unable to help,

            not wanting to walk out in the middle of a Baker act.

What had happened?

            A final spurning, an arms length too long from his crush;

a spiral; a threat of suicide;

            a report; an escort away from here.

I sit in the adjacent room

            hearing my student sobbing and screaming.

                        This is a divergence, an elegy, a proposal:

a Soviet philosopher postulates a secular religion,

            that mankind’s purpose is to progress till

a technological singularity, the ability to reverse entropy.

            A physicist, James Maxwell, proposes a thought experiment:

two boxes, one empty, one filled with energetic particles

            connected by a small gated pathway,

governed by a demon allowing

            only the fastest particles to cross.

This is the death of entropy;

             Maxwell’s demon works the switch maniacally

and for a second the crying pauses,

            the world unravels.

            Dosimeter gauges fall to zero,

the sarcophagus is pulled back from Chernobyl,

            Fat Man rises from Nagasaki,

the bomb bay clicking shut, welcoming it home

            to be dismantled with other atrocities

as wild swine return to their pens, become domesticated,

            and the Spanish take them home, take back their plagues,

unarriving from the Americas to return to monarchs,

            as Rome spirals up from flames,

ashes coalesce into slums and coliseums,

            aqueducts are dismantled by legions,

and the pyramids reveal the secrets of their destruction

            as woolly mammoths moon walk out of tar pits,

dinosaurs shoo away an asteroid,

            slough into primordial alphabet soup:

amino acids, proteins, minerals.

            The moon returning itself to the earth,

the earth reaching a barren wholeness, a death—

            atoms distancing themselves, unbonding

until everything is a gathering,

            a singular point.

The joy to be alive and dead.

            The explosive potential of existence—

                        a demon permitting

                                    a child to escape.

Ship Burial

I’d like to be cremated

            and thrown into the sea despite my fears

of wine-dark or tannic-stained waters

            and the unnamed things that brush your feet

when wading out into the brine.

            Years ago, when I would inner-tube down the Ichetucknee river

I would fear the cold water lapping at my ass

            and the unseen snake that might glide underneath me

and come to appreciate in a new way

            the donut-like invitation of man-flesh

pooching out the middle of a rubber tube.

            Then again, in ancient times, when Jarls or Kings would die

the norse supposedly would arrange gold,

            silver, and arms in funerary boats and lay their lord

in the midst of the glittering to be burnt; consumed

            and buried in the ground all the same.

It seems without pillaging it is harder to pile

            a life’s accomplishments into beautiful arrays.

And even this became a decision for the pillager—

            to wear chainmail in the boarding action and risk drowning

or wear nothing and die in a pointed end.

            In the last warm weeks of fall

I drive south along the coast

            to St. Petersburg and Treasure Island.

I stand on the shore.

            The red tide burns my eyes and throat

as I wade out into the water coughing,

            the fish float past me in the surf

all mangled sockets and eyes,

            the first easy pickings of seabirds,

the ocean telling me in a burning tongue

            to keep my flesh and treasures,

that it refuses to cherish

            even the creature born to it.

Will Anderson received his B.A. in Creative Writing from Florida State University and has returned to pursue his MFA. Having spent younger summers working for his father’s timber company, he logged for a time after undergrad and later taught high school English. His work has appeared most recently in Entropy Magazine.