Weeds and Stars

Lisa Rosenberg

Weeds and stars and everything between,
from ocean dwellers to accretion disks—
resilient, intact, or wholly fragmented—
recall the transience of clouds.

The ocean dwellers and accretion disks, 
the finest river stones and faintest moons
recall the transience of clouds,
of harmonies at work in gorgeous noise.

The faintest moon, the finest river stone,
the lucid silences at play in dreams
find harmony afoot in gorgeous noise.
Let night and day be open quandaries

in play with silences and lucid dreams.
Forget the cries for certainty, the heft 
of night and day and open quandaries,
the pitch-perfected music of the spheres.

The case for certainty forgets the weft
of wholes, of fragments and resiliency,
imperfect music of imperfect spheres, 
the weediest of stars, the in-betweens.

The Science

From the cosmological to the creaturely and planetary, this poem juxtaposes and interweaves disparate natural phenomena. These are shaped in part by regular patterning influences, such as molecular structure, but also by chaotic dynamics, which are extremely sensitive to changes in initial conditions. We can observe the effects of these dynamics in everyday systems like the weather: wide, often unpredictable variations of expected patterns emerge, in addition to ongoing change - clouds being among the most readily visible examples. 

I chose to work in the pantoum poetic form because it offers explicit opportunities for regularity, variation, and shifting assemblages. A completed pantoum also gives rise, as all poems do, to new meanings through the complex interactions of its unfolding. Given the theme ofchaos, these mimetic aspects of using the form appealed to me throughout composition. 

The Poet

Lisa Rosenberg is the author of A Different Physics (2018), winner of the American Legacy Book Award for Poetry, as well as essays spanning memoir, science, travel, and satire. A former space program engineer trained as a physicist, she served as Poet Laureate of San Mateo County, California. Her work has been recognized by a Djerassi Leonardo Residency, Wallace Stegner Fellowship, and MOSAIC America Fellowship.

Next poem: After the lecture there was time for questions by Clare Bryden