Two Poems for Science

silviana amethyst

Two Poems for Science

by Silviana Amethyst

read at the 2018 Frederick and Joan Christopherson Schmidt Robert Frost Celebration of American Poetry at the University of Wisconsin – Eau Claire.

deforming through life ¶

walk, step by step, attempting to predict one, two  
	five, eight.  then, off by a little.  
kind of lost, but the path must be close by.  
look around, are friends near?  no eyes to  
	be seen, just jays, and square roots of -1.  
a quick correction  
	back up onto the ridge  
down was a slippery slope into a gulch  
	of incredible inaccuracy  
with condition numbers on the order of  
	the pleasantness of the sun's rays on the  
	hottest days of summer  
another step  
	there's a mountain on the left  
	as we speed by, guided by   
	green and white sans serif  
and that nagging sense that  
	something just beyond belief  
is destined to happen over  
	the course of my lifetime.  
in the endgame, a spider web, a subtle manoevre   
	 a possible tracking backwards  
to all the startpoints i'll never experience  

cateryx ¶

under the adjoint tangential cateryx, there is a centipede the size of an asteroid.  
it is holding a fan, smoothly interpolating between the constant sections of  
the solution to a PDE with a shock, which is capable of not only dislocating   
your second derivative, but also of solving the everlasting and eternal problem  
of the energetic free minimum of the integral of your net rate of decay.  
ergo, my nullspace, wrt some unmentionable nonlinear transformation,  
is equivalent to the set of branch points of  
	the critical 3-fold of  
	the critical surface of  
	the critical curve of  
	the critical points of  
an arbitrary function of time.