Brownian Motion

         The random movements of minute particles immersed in a fluid; or

         the mathematical models used to describe those random movements.

Picture, then, the great bridge

piercing the fog and disappearing.

Unceasing algorithms of the action

fulfilled throughout the day.

Like a lone ascetic patiently dressing

and undressing, over and over,

the same unaffected diction of apparel

marking diminutive shifts of motion.

A foot lifting out a trouser leg, just so.

Then in again, seconds later,

never the same way twice. 

Picture it—the bridge in vapor, and out—

as if you exist to behold the plain,

pliant vicissitudes of transition. Only

harbor men come so near the heady rift

of its masterful surrender. And even they

less than them who chart the wind, tides,

and what metals the air bears that day.

The heaving of tides, the heaving of blood,

saline chemistries

blindly ferrying atoms of spirit

through headlong membranes of matter.

Your own body the instrument for this

elastic collusion of particles—

the fluid-phase equilibria of your dreams

and devastations, your pissings, achings,

and sighs. The clench and release of lucent

brain liquors and tart belly tinctures,

the temperate hydraulics of the spine,

all rocking, rocking their drunken cargo

of particles endlessly on to a somewhere.

And we are most concerned with

the fluctuations. Our contrapuntal gestures

totting up the stochastic of loving.

In regions of space where it might once

have occurred, at intervals where it might

at any instant arise. Our urgent reckonings

cast into random fields of nothingness.

The incalculable span between your glance

this morning and reaching for the teaware now.

Peacock Journal, December 2018