Cosmic Connections

By Olive L. Sullivan

When I was working from home, my life seemed pretty seamless. Tasks flowed one into the other, and there wasn’t a marked dichotomy between “work” and “life” the way there seems to be now that I have a “real job.” Since I leave my house early each morning and seem to come home merely to change clothes or sleep, life is something that happens on weekends, and has little connection to work.

Since most of the people in my workplace have a skill set far outside my comfort zone, the dichotomy is even more pronounced. Honestly, what do I have in common with all these engineers and physicists and tech geeks? I’m what my friend Sue calls a word nerd, and even though these guys are self-professed nerds, we all learned in high school that math nerds and word nerds don’t mix. I think of myself as a poet, an artist, and—I’ll admit it—a bit of a flake. I think of these people as serious-minded scientists and technicians. We are not The Same. We have little in common but a willingness to accept the other’s completely weird world view.

But sometimes worlds collide.

One Friday at lunch, several of the guys were talking about scientific theories of dark matter. Briefly, dark matter is stuff that emits no light or energy of any kind, but scientists hypothesize that it exists because of its effects on other objects that we can detect with our scientific instruments. The debate rages in the scientific community, but goes largely unremarked by those of us who learned about the planet Pluto and the dinosaur Brontosaurus in grade school, only to have both those “facts” change by the time our kids entered school. (For those of you who haven’t been paying attention, the creature we knew as a Brontosaurus is now a Brachiosaurus, and Pluto is no longer a planet.) I know just enough about dark matter, from my lifelong exposure to science geeks, to hold my own in such a conversation, and even make intelligent contributions from time to time. And then we all went back to work.

Sunday, I attended my regular poetry critique group, something I do to keep myself connected to my real life, reminding me that I’m a poet, not a tech writer.

The group is made up of poetry professors and grad students, all serious about the art and craft of poetry and language. It’s challenging, stimulating, creative work of the kind that most people don’t see when they read the finished piece in a book or journal. It’s the nuts and bolts of my real world, the same way capacitors and circuit breakers are the tools of the trade at my workplace.

But then Chris Anderson, who teaches literature at Pittsburg State University, passed out his poem to be critiqued. The working title, “Field Cosmology” caught my attention right away. From Chris I expect an interesting blend of nature and science that is reflected in the poem’s title, with its play on scientific field work. But as he read, the disparate parts of my life crashed into one another like atoms in a particle accelerator, and that interesting blend became a remarkable fusion. The hard science conversation at work was the same conversation we had over Chris’s poem. Just the imagery was different. When some of the group members questioned Chris’s images, I was able to connect the hard science facts with the metaphors of the poem to make it make sense.

As I passionately explained that the blackbird in the last stanza, folding and unfolding its wings, is the universe expanding and contracting and expanding again as various scientific theories take the lead, and that the kestrel in stanza two is the radio telescope in stanza one, all kinds of things made sense. To me, this is what poetry has always done. It takes ideas and thoughts that are not quite accessible, that can’t be expressed in words, and presents them as images that expand the reader’s mind until the inexpressible becomes the inevitable. Poems are the dark matter of the literary mind. You know a poem works by the effect it has on objects around it. I knew all that, recognized the interconnectedness of science geek and word nerd because I have always straddled the demarcation between the two realms of thought, especially when it comes to nature studies. After all, poets know the names of birds and trees and animals; it gives us power over them. But lately, with my focus on fighting for balance in my stressful “real job,” I had forgotten that the balance is already there. It seems only fitting that a poem would remind me of it.

Chris has given me permission to publish his poem even though it’s still a work in progress. Even its title is still in flux, as are all those theories about dark matter and the real composition of the universe.

So, under the title “Field,” here it is.

Radio telescopes turn their ears
to the sky and hear the mad howls
of solar winds, the big bang’s
birth pangs, a cacophony of gamma rays
and x-rays, the death-rattle of stars.

From a hundred yards away, a kestrel
hears a vole’s footfall, cocks her head,
opens her talons and strikes. A harrier
flies ten feet above the hay field: dark matter
hovering alongside the visible world.

The cosmos is a starling: specks of light
on a dark body, a squawker and a thief.
Universe, magnificent blackbird, chirr
like a locust, moan in your sleep, fold
your wings, spread them, fold them again.

My column "Back to the Rat Race" appears every two weeks in Joplin Tri-State Business. This edition was published on March 31, 2009. JTSB is now available online at www.joplintristate.biz.