Ode to Nikolai Tesla’s Equation of the Universe
“If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency, and vibration.” - Nikolai Tesla
Vibration
“these waves would be weak and hard to find, but they're all predicted to make up a resonant 'hum' that permeates our Universe [...] we may have just caught the first hint of it.” - Science Alert
One Sunday, I sat next to the man with the chin strap, who
sat next to the man with the over-sized overalls; across, and eyes darting to,
the woman in the pew, vibrating, head lilting above the lilacs
displayed in our bullseye of attending. She swayed
to the silent symphony of sacred and service. Aspiring.
Outside, drizzle drift. Static. The steady
hum of a subatomic parade.
Crow ruffles and fans,
choreography of wet weight.
I forget about the road until
the tires hissed sounds of sog and sop.
Inside, I
fidget to find , turning
the cool ivory knob and tensioning the string.
Chorale with the rhapsody
just beyond my reach.
Frequency
“The way in which humans hear above or below water differs; that difference means they only hear between 20 and 20,000 hertz through the air, while they can catch sounds all the way up to 200,000 hertz when submerged.” From HealthDay
Briefly, I forget it’s listening.
Coral’s tuning fork forest. Tree’s
roots for conduction. We bury
bodies deep, at last to grasp the gap
between what is heard, what they sing.
Whales shepherding things
like one if by land,
infinity by sea.
Beethoven,
a rod between his teeth,
attached to the piano, nearing
relief — tasting sweet
sound in spite of smithereens.
Energy
"It is important to realize that in physics today, we have no knowledge what energy is.” - Richard Feynman
Again, I blaze to bottle energy,
top off the poem’s estuaries, each
reading turns them arteries, each
reading makes them bleed.
And if not read —
maybe a monarch migration.
Earth’s eyelashes batting gossamer
flurries from Minnesota to Michoacán.
A salmon run; flocking, flowing,
re-tracing organs, river to sea.
The life that movement is.
Entropy and unseen, dueting with the leaves.
Can you feel the fire fever?
Can you tune the hard heart’s strings?
I wrote a longer piece this week! Typically, I’m most comfortable playing within the realm of shorter poetry as I think the ability for a poem to say a lot with a little is a beautiful thing, but this week I found myself playing with a multiplicity of themes too large to sum up in a few stanzas (or maybe I was just having fun).
I had been working on an essay/exploration on sound and trying to find science that backs up why/how “drones” or “ohms” often bring us closer to the spiritual/meditative. I got stuck. I wound up in a place that felt like I needed an answer and I only had questions — a great indicator that I should stop and write a poem. The interspersed quotations were going to be citations in that essay but I think they are better off here as framing. I chose not to read them in my recording, but I do think they provide helpful context and I love the feeling of being in conversation in poems.
The image, albeit not great, is of the monarch butterfly which is a hallmark of KC for me. (Funnily, Hallmark is also a hallmark of KC…) I typed “butterfly” into my photos and this random image came up and, 4+ years later, I’m struck by the parallelism of the lines on the wings and the lines on the fence. Something I never noticed when I took it. The world rhymes time and time again.
This poem is an attempted response to a question I’m still working on locating (while also being a celebration of questions!). I think what I’m trying to ask is something like if art is bottled energy and nobody engages with the art, where does that energy go? Or, similarly, if art were to be expressed energy, and nobody makes the art… where does that energy go? How else is it expressed in the world?
The poem follows personal moments of noticing movement and presence, ranging from a Quaker service to a snorkel to a monarch’s migration. Movement is all there is. For more on movement, this is a recent beautiful audio essay from one of my favorite minds, David Abram.
Hope you’re enjoying the audio versions - they make me nervous 😅
Thanks for reading.