WWSotM: Cassini explains perspective

And so we come to the end of micro collection, and we step back for a moment...

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Cassini explains perspective

Everything you know;
everyone you know, have known, will ever know;

everywhere you've been;
everywhere you've never been;

everywhere you could be,
including even, if NASA would only play along,
the Moon;

every song that sticks in your head
all through some rainy afternoon;
every balloon, released accidentally
by any toddler;

every toddler;
every teen;

every thought you ever think;
every meme, you cut and paste on Facebook;

every face;
every book;

every member of the appropriate sex,
who has that certain style—all in

        In the sixteen hundreds, Cassini explained --
        for those travelling a long way --
        how to measure longitude with two clocks,
        the Sun, and careful observations
        of eclipsing Jovian moons.

        Cassini also observed
        the gap in Saturn's rings
        through which we today fling
        a careful dart and have it, looking back,
        photograph

that one pixel : this island Earth.

So I say: stuff your rather pointless election campaign,
pour your new recipe hair conditioner down the drain,
smoke or do not smoke, if you keep it away from me
because none of that matters—
let me tell you about perspective.

WWSotM: Earth-like planets...

It's bloody hot, so I'm just going to query whether we actually need the word "exoplanet" and get on with the poem (which I recorded on a far cooler day...)

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Earth-like planets...

...where the hanging moment of morning
finds cloud unbound and the song moves on.
Where she sang that song, the one that rhymes
"heart" with "card" and where...

Here's another one!  Jake looks up from the machine.
it's like the universe is stuffed with the damn things--
and another, this one's pinkish... which means
if the Universe is filled with places of this sort,

then life cannot be killed... will always have
another place to go.  He looks around.  She's gone again.
He feels he is in love, but that it will not work.
He'd like to buy her a drink later

except she never is about.  Never mind,
he calls, in case she is still there.  Meanwhile,
at the other end of the telescope, she spreads
her blanket on the ground, just beyond the pale

pink shadow of the untrees, opens the picnic basket
and sits down...

WWSotM: Fast woman

And so we come to relativity, relativity and a woman.

The title of this seems less than feminist, fortunately (or rather by design) the title doesn't mean what it seems.

In relativity, there's a place called "the elsewhere" it's the bits of spacetime which are far enough from us in space and too close in time for light to make the journey.  There isn't enough time.  Nothing is faster than light, so the elsewhere is out of reach.  No possible information can travel from there to here, so we can't see it; or from here to there, so we can't affect it either.

Note, however, that spacetime is four dimensional.  So this doesn't mean there are 3D places that we cannot access.  We can see their past and affect their future; it's just an area around the present that's gone missing...

...rather like self-contained woman in this poem.  She was here, but now she's off about her own business; maybe she'll be back tomorrow.

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Fast woman

Einstein-like, she chooses curves
for living space and all of her free-time;
meanders through the gallery,
coffee in hand, pursues the light. Behind
the paintings shade to infrared;
they glow with ultraviolet light ahead

while all I see is the faintest blur,
a fragile shock-wave in rebounding air
from where she spent a millisecond
staring at Matisse: the dancing one

—imagine:
the daisy-chaining figures spin
faster,
their flesh transformed
to something rich and more robust
to keep breasts rounded
and hands clasped
under stress
of cosmological significance;
picture fauvism
conceding to relativity
a reference frame dragged slowly
to a closed curve
where all there ever was
all there every will be
is the dance—

she leaves a hint of perfume;
a dent that appears
then recoils as suddenly to flatness:
an institutional bench cushion at rest.