On 'Entropy'
a poem
On Entropy
The weather will not change.
—Tropic of Cancer
When she made meatballs for dinner in August, He went to the grocery store for ricotta, he, a cosmologist, bought tofu and told her that technically speaking the mechanism for atomic fusion remained constant regardless of ingredient. The Persian rug bore the fluffy brown and white body of Remy the dog—tilting his head to an andante beat. The dinner table—that stained oak canvas— set with snug normality, orbited by domestic bliss, pop science shock and awe and humanity’s rugged definition. The four tablesides suspended in the centerpiece like =. The first to taste the devil’s sour gum was Gemini, God rest his soul, then Karis and Cloister’s prudish lips, finally Paragon sapped the last of that pale imposture and slowly each of us, like magnolia leaves, began to spoil in the brusque exposure. Remy the dog’s tongue, undried, and tasting the tofu air, his ears shifting. ‘Out with the lot of it!’ shouts Paragon and suddenly an end is gone and the equation, that fickle beast, is unnaturally imbalanced in the most natural way. Karis with her lips like New Yorkers smacks the swill with dismay and indignation: she alights from the table— I knew it I just knew it but I tried yet I knew it— to Remy the dog’s further til-tottering. Cloister and Gemini: on earth as it is in heaven: beamed with unequal guilt and also forlornness as the meatballs and tofu of the petri plate distilled off onto the carpet and … Back on the grocery store floor a shelver toyed the glasses onto a shelf— tofu ricotta festering.