Love Letters from Entropy 

SL Walsh

This is your most unlikely form.
One in a billion possibilities or more
And also, eventually
Everything falls apart. 

Call it entropy or call it art. 

Things are getting messy out there. 
Wind casts particles from temporary play palaces
that lived for only a spec of time
stuck in invisible light cones like 
spiders in a cup, nevermind, nevermind.

The moon sends a quiver through her long distance lover 
and so water likes to spread itself thin across the shore
like peanut butter and jelly
or the borders of the cosmos
and everything else we want a taste of.

Sweeping across the silica stage
dismantling golden ages marked by
footprint puddles and plastic shovels,
now you think it all looks the same,
every migrant grain of sand
a galaxy in its own right.

The arrow of time decides 
to dis-organize everything. 

Suppose that disorder is inevitable.
Chaos is the only constant. 
Unrecognizable, the way the world shifts and changes,
from the day to day
twists itself, rotates
hurling rock between dark and light.

It's just the nature of things
to ruin our plans

to wash away our designs
and find new forms to interpret 
within the collective mind's eye. 

The nature of things
is to get carried away.
To hitch a ride across the expanding landscape
to contort and confuse
to refuse man-made shape.

Don't forget
we're just two specks like everything else,
just because we can’t see through this black sea.

Swimming in our sleep, 
Painting lucid dreams
Steeping psilocybin to decipher what it means

It isn't disordered,
it's only novel
or too big or small to be recognizable, 
It’s just a mismatch of dimensions and eyes

You say it's a pile of sand
I say it is a mountain of tiny crystal worlds
never to take shape in the same way again

I've never seen a water droplet 
bounce from the pavement 
all the way back to heaven.
I’ve never felt the wind jump from my lungs
to huddle in the corner 
wishing for its mother.
But I know anything is possible

because I can see every stripe of pigment in your iris, 
round that big beautiful dilated dot.
Because every freckle, every pore, every tooth is 
right where your DNA planted it
precisely the way the universe planned it

and there it will be
all impossible and orderly
simple nerve and bone in all its ordinary glory,
each patriotic cell plays its crucial role

and whether through light waves or particles,
two slits, my pupils expand to take it all in
tracing the pattern they interpret as you.

Sure, flesh melts back into soil,
seeds sprout, cattle graze, 
wolves hunt, feed their babies,
energy dissipates every step of the way.

Still, we pass on the blueprint as long as we can,
growing iterations, they change, they expand, 
until their next turn to decay into land.

I wonder where we’ve been before—
I think that we will meet again.

There won’t be room for terror 
in that universal heat death.

If this was all so unlikely, 
I wonder what might happen next;
our eyes might adjust
to the light of shorter wavelengths:

Supervision, gamma rays
childs play like laser tag.
Catch me if you can, I call
running faster than light beams
till we’re all the way back

on your porch,
after work
in the downpour of rain
like a grain of sand moving along the landscape;

unless you look closely,
just an ordinary day.

The Science

Entropy says everything is ephemeral. Knowing someone or seeing something as it is today becomes special because it is fleeting, and the fact that you even exist is about a 1 in 102,685,000 chance. Given the unlikeliness of your existence, though, there’s reason to believe that anything else can be possible too. Unlikely things happen all the time and I think there is hope to be had in that. 

There is something inherently romantic about the fact that energy is dissipating all the time and supposedly we are headed towards this universal heat death, but we keep doing human things anyway. We continue to create things, people, playing just for the sake of playing. I also wanted to challenge the idea of what constitutes chaos or disorder as our understanding of the universe continues to evolve.

The Poet

SL Walsh holds an undergraduate degree in creative writing and publishing from Sheridan College and is currently completing her master’s in communication and new media at McMaster University. She enjoys writing science fiction and poetry and is inspired by concepts in physics and ecology. She has had a short story on AI titled ‘Webworld’ published in Alchemy by Sheridan College, as well as multiple articles published in McMaster’s Facility Services News.

Next poem: Mother Goddess by Natasha Allen