Hot Air - a physics poem

nothing like integrating science and art!


Hot Air
by Amber Morrell
4/9/2010



If everything is temporary,

I’m lying naked on my back but this fever
still permeates my skin, sweating out the smoke
and mirror tricks I became accustomed to;
smoke like your fireplace that burns olive wood, which
turns thermodynamic equations to hot air
and distinctively lingers on your clothes;
mirrors like those in funhouses, and those
crystals that refract red lasers onto graph paper.

Did you know the speed of light is a
universal constant? Did you know that graphite
caught in the second dimension could reach for the
stars if only it could escape to that elusive
three-dimensional world? I am those
molecules of carbon, crying out from graphite
sheets just waiting to be freed from pristine lines in
laboratories and the grasp of latex gloves.

I curse my olfactory senses, tie my nostrils in knots
to be sure they never again taste the poison of your
scent. It’s phantom smells, an obsession, my own
psyche ticking off the second hands of my biological clock.
Time is escaping us like a thief from nonconfrontationalists.
I’ve found faith: everyone in this town must use the
same methods of heating their homes in the winter
as you do.

then how can light’s velocity be constant?

Is the 'you' in the second stanza the same 'you' as the third? It's unclear. Otherwise, you've done well. I love the science / poetry overlap.

This. Is. Fantastic.

I LOVE reading about science when it's under the mask of poetry - it adds such a strange layer to it all! And you have pulled it off very well indeed. There are lots of lovely images in there, many fascinating ideas - non too incomprehensible to the average non-physicist (which I am not!) - and I like how the ultimate question is framed around the poem - literally. In fact, that was what I read first!

I cannot wait to read other poems of yours. This is really something. Well done