Chasing the Cheshire Smile - A Poem about Science by Mark Heffron
Chasing the Chesire Smile
Schrodinger's cat has leaped from his box
And grins in the light of the milky way.
In the Rubaiyat of quarks and less,
The moving mind,
Having thought,
Moves on.
Nor all your wisdom
Nor all your wit
Can calculate its whereabouts,
Nor any passing thought
Record a trace of it.
How can you photograph
The perspective of your eye?
Or grasp the hand
Already gone?
How can the scientist ever capture
One wave in the ever-flowing ocean
Of his own consciousness?
Where is the crossroads between
The human brain and the cosmos?
Can the universe be reduced to equations
Or is math our Tower of Babel
Upon which mankind can build an elaborate springboard
To take a grand swan-dive into oblivion?
Every star that beckons
Has already escaped the image
Reflected in the astronomer's eye.
Inside Pandora's box of equations,
The cryptic numbers are nature's own.
"Who am I?" is always answered by
"I am that am".
Paint-by-number programmers
Splash their phosphor landscapes
With the palettes of iterative equations
Until the signatures of beauty emerge
Orbiting the invisible strange attractor
Mystics and lovers call the heart.
Spiraling down the cosmic mind-field
The roller-coaster frequencies shrink,
And vital signs flicker like dying candles
Until the still blood surrenders its light
And the flat-line sleeper awakens to ecstasy.
At the chalk marks on his blackboard,
Peers through the looking-glasses
Of microscopes, telescopes
And particle accelerators
At the fleeting trails of the illusive cat
With his countless calico lives
Who keeps dividing himself by zero
And disappears again and again
Into that inscrutable smile.
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