The Second Law of Thermodynamics
By David Barber
30 April 2012
The mower cable's puzzled into knots again
and somewhere, out of sight, a spider freezes
as that dropped screw rolls to a halt. Sadly
there are more ways of being wrong than right.
Adrift for thirty years myself I know
it's easier to be lost than found.
Consider it as manumission from
the rituals of fate and fingers crossed.
There are just less ways of being right than wrong:
that sweet spot missed despite much fumbling;
fruitless hours with tangled words; all those
frogs which just stayed frogs when kissed.
Comments
I appreciated this poem, but the last line seemed too prosaic an end for such a weighty theme. This, however - "and somewhere, out of sight, a spider freezes / as that dropped screw rolls to a halt. Sadly" - was exquisitely executed.
Just happened to be passing by and wanted to say how much I enjoyed this. Thanks for sharing it.
Am I missing a subtle grammar joke?
Shouldn't "its" (posessive) in line 6 should be "it's" (contraction of "it is")?
Also, are the ways in line 9 discrete or continuous? To my mind, they are a countably discrete quantity, like the rooms in Cantor's Grand Hotel.
If so, you should say "fewer ways" instead of "less ways."
Thanks for the comments, all!
Michael: Thank you for pointing that out; I checked with the poetry editors, and they said "its" was a typo, so that's now fixed.
As for less vs fewer, I didn't ask the poetry editors, but my take on that is that when tone is fairly informal, the distinction isn't generally a big deal--people informally use the two words relatively interchangeably. If this were a formal essay, I would agree with you, but here it seems like a reasonable choice to me.
Especially because "fewer" might throw off the intended meter of the line.
Picking that particular nit was mostly an excuse to talk about infinity and grammar at the same time. Somewhat perversely, I find both exciting.
Meter, shmeter. "Fewer" becomes "less" if you work at it: for the really determined lawn mower physicist, the discrete ways (of screwing up) blur into a continuum as the number of failed attempts gets sufficiently large.
As for "its" vs. "it's", I once studied statistical mechanics under a European theoretical physicist who wrote "its" and said "it is." Thus, even though he understood the distinction better than his knuckle-dragging graduate students, his tongue could only manage "The dog bit *it is* tail."
Stat. mech. is such a lyrical, haunting subject. What's the old student's trope?
"S = k log Z
First it killed Boltzmann and now it's killing me."
Hmmm. Doesn't scan so well....
I'll leave you poor editors alone now.
Very lovely. Didn't go where I expected it would!