The Scientist

Every morning when I saunter down the hallway

with sleep in my eyes and the remnants of

last night’s dream still kicking stardust in my head,

I see you sitting on an orange chair in the sunroom

rolling an infinity cube through your fingers,

tufts of yellow hair hovering over your head

like a soul star chakra made of pi.

Your glasses, thick as a jeweler’s loupe,

are balanced on the tip of your nose to better examine

the not so secret secrets buried under Atomic City and

kept neat and tidy on a thousand spreadsheets.

Crossing the threshold into your makeshift office

is like being invited to sit for a spell in your brilliant mind.

It’s piled to the rafters with sunlight and sticky notes and

terracotta runes and magic wands that really work and

books crammed into a shelf, forward and backwards,

sideways and upside down, as if these heroes of yours

Asimov Sagan Heinlein

have no use for spatial awareness anymore.

They wrote fictitious accounts of a world we never

had the good sense to create for ourselves, so

now you spend your days scooping up

the radioactive remains out on Middle DP Road,

the toxic legacy of the late, great nuclear maestros

Oppenheimer Fermi Feynman

I can see it scattered all over the desk and the floor,

mathematical formulas that may as well be hieroglyphs

written on gridded paper in your mad-scientist scrawl.

I curl up on the chair with my coffee, strong as rocket fuel,

in a cozy gray sweater that hangs down to my knees.

I ask how your morning is going, an innocent question,

that some days makes you grumble like a bear

that found strontium-90 in his picnic basket,

though most days it’s a self-contained sort of fission

that lights you up from the inside and makes a smile

ignite across your face like a combustible spark.

It’s a spontaneous reaction to a question that I know

will get you waxing poetic for hours

about the handful of lovely things that make you tick

Music Physics The Cosmos

You put down your fidget toy and pick up a guitar,

the one that’s been gathering dust in the corner and,

as you sort out Gomorrah on mealy strings,

the wind picks up and the snow begins to fall and

our conversation bounces from the Manhattan Project

to the half-life of seemingly unknowable things like

the politics of war in a country that puts an arsenal

into the hands of every fat man and little boy ready to

exert their will for fifteen minutes of fame.

They’ll leave a trail of blood in their wake,

spattered across America like a Rorschach test

that proves once and for all we’re fucking crazy.

For all the complex messes you so capably clean,

this one’s going to be a real head scratcher.

It’s not lost on either of us that, the moment you’re done

decontaminating the town that built the bombs that

brought World War II to a painful and fiery halt

Trinity Hiroshima Nagasaki

there will be a line of men, kicking around the bodies,

looking high and low for another bone to pick.

They’ve created a waste stream that permeates everything.

I wonder if you could come up with a formula that

can wash all this blood off of our hands?

You grab a notepad and your Dr. Who pen that lights up blue

and we spend our days hashing out the sordid mess.

In the end, we stumble upon a fool proof solution

Peace Kindness Love

You push away from your desk, you look at me and mutter,

“It worked.”