The distance between rage and miracle
I said at dinner, When I was immortal then . . .
A guest interrupts, when were you immortal?
so yes, I back track because she’s a philosopher.
She’s a philosopher, so yes I back track
and say before I knew, before waiting for the tests.
Before I knew, before the tests, before the waits,
mortality belonged to another generation, or a book.
In the book mortality belonged to another generation
though somehow I made it to the front of the line.
Somehow I made it to the front of the line
so I told the philosopher, ok, I forgot.
I forgot the disconsolations of philosophy –
the long distance between rage and miracle.
SWIMM — 1/2025
Drake’s Equation
You wish Drake’s Equation was more than a nearly random linkage of terms to predict extraterrestrial life. Oh you pattern makers. Back in the bronze age, a centaur was enough for a man, but now you want the bar in Star Wars where you can drink with aliens who have enough in common with us to be cheated at cards.
Trajectory
The problem set gives us: a stone, force, an angle.
Given this, predict when the stone will hit the ground.
Outside the book this problem grows more complex
even if there are no dragons to interfere with the trajectory.
Imagine a missile. No don’t. There’s no need to imagine:
haven’t you opened the paper today? Imagine a war
where children’s bodies form the location of the necessary
violence. Don’t authorities always say necessary?
Imagine or don’t the intersection between a missile
and an apartment block. The shoes, the plates,
a shelf full of exploded books. Imagine a graveyard,
damp with morning fog, petrichor rising, polinators
slipping past the plastic flowers hungry for something real.
Imagine picking up a stone, two stones, and placing them
on a grave, where the story of nothing special here
is more important than a name, than the dates below.
(New Verse News 10/8/2023)
Bio: Carol Dorf has received fellowships from the Hawthornden Foundation, Zoeglossia, and the Napa Valley Writers’, as well as “Best of the Net” and “Best Microfiction” nominations. Their writing appears on the Poetry Foundation website, in several chapbooks, and in journals that include “Pleiades,” “About Place,” “Cutthroat,” “Braving the Body,” “The Mom Egg,” “American Stories,” “Five South,” “YesYesPoetry,” and “Scientific American.” Founding poetry editor of Talking Writing, they taught mathematics and poetry in Berkeley USD, at museums, and at conferences.