A Very Modern Adam

image borrowed from bing

A Very Modern Adam


Elevenses. Today as every day he takes
the apple from his briefcase, places it
upon his desk and waits
for it to levitate.
It never does,
but still he knows it might. One day
it could surprise the world.

He'll sit transfixed before it for a while
and peering in will see a wilderness
of spinning shadow forms, motes, specks of no-life,
bits left over from the Big Bang - if
there ever was one - clouding empty space.

And what of time? That, too, is clouded -
and so he feels affinity
with all of nature's works
and wonders of the apple if its spinning wonders
took the forms they did because
those were their own predestined shapes:
the juices, for example, seeds and textured flesh.
Had each of these its own worn ruts to run
laid down in days - millennia - gone by
by trees with certain tales to tell,
which trees, life span by life span deepening
the grooves, carved out what we call memory?

And might the wooden desk
not say the same?
Or through the window glass
the summer rain?
Sometimes he thinks himself into the apple's flesh.
It's like he's landed somewhere out in space -
but ruts don't seem to work out there.

And so he peers again through apple skin,
seeing the apple's heart, its cloud of whirling pin heads,
and as a face in any cloud might form,
the face of Newton forms in this.
With Newton comes a clockwork mechanism
erasing for a moment thoughts of ruts.

The apple levitates at last - he thinks - perhaps
in some magnetic field.
And so his mindset shifts again and opens to
computer metaphors: the apple is the end result
of programs memorised to clone themselves
through an eternity of ruts.

But none of these will do. The apple eats
the metaphors. He sees them fall
like scales from eyes grown dim. The old
dichotomies dissolve. What if
there is no matter, all is energy? In school
we learned about converting one
to other. Science is too pure a thing
to leave to scientists.


Dave King

Posted over on his site Pics & Poems
Listed as #38 over at dVerse Poets-Undercurrents