The Theory of Snow

The night was dark, really dark.
I stopped above the round about
and hurried to urniate
fearful of the wild pigs, omnivores
that stag along the streets
at night. The deer wander through
the hedges to gape and yawn.
The big cats and bears are still
one range away in their territory
where the roads washed away
in a hundred year rain last summer.

When will it be the last time?

This brain of mine is imagination,
corroborated and clean, full
of the most drastic information.
Women here are flag lace and spread eagled,
I'm not used to it anymore,
not used to the going feral.

This snow is a bright lozenge
in the night, hoped for, planned out.
Every piece falls conspicuously
through the lamplight as I wait
for the dragnet of your verbs,
the tragedy of all is well.

No one is well now, are they?

Books I've Read

The Glorious Quran
Al Nahjul Al Balagha (The Peak of Eloquence)
The French Lieutenant's Woman
Sister Carrie
Anna Karenina
For Whom the Bell Tolls
Practically everything by Collette
Fear of Flying
The Second Sex
On Photography
Jane Eyre
Far From the Madding Crowd
In Praise of Older Women
Zen and the Art of Motorcyle Maintenance
The Old Man and the Sea
Ecce Homo
Thus Spake Zarathustra
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
The Heart of the Matter
The End of the Affair
Practically all prose written by Jorge Luis Borges
The Divine Comedy
Nothing by Shakespeare
The Heart of Darkness
A Brief History of Time
The Count of Monte Cristo
Tender is the Night
Madame Bovary
Lady Chatterly's Lover
A Farewell to Arms
The Prince
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Tropic of Cancer
Henry and June
Lolita
The Lonely Hearts Club
Catcher in the Rye
The Sun Also Rises
...to be continued

Thermohaline energy transfers and global warming:

http://www.aip.org/history/climate/oceans.htm


Another great unknown was the interaction between currents like the
Gulf Stream and the giant eddies that the currents spun off as they
meandered. Evidence of these broad, sluggishly rotating columns of
water had turned up during a survey voyage across the North Atlantic
in 1960. This was confirmed by an international campaign carried out
by six ships and two aircraft in the early 1970s — another example
of how studying ocean phenomena needed international cooperation.
The survey discovered eddies bigger than Belgium that plowed through
the seas for months. What oceanographers had supposed were static
differences in the oceans between their sparse measuring-points, had
often actually been changes over time, not over space.
The oceanographers had been vaguely aware that when meteorologists
built atmospheric models, they included the energy carried by wind
eddies as an important factor (physical oceanography, as one
practitioner remarked, was "to some extent a mirror of
meteorology"). Yet it was astounding to see what prodigious
quantities of heat, salt, and kinetic energy the ocean eddies
carried. Indeed nearly all the energy in the ocean system was in
these middle-sized movements, not in the ocean currents at all.
(28*)

He has set free the two seas meeting together. There is a barrier
between them. They do not transgress. (Quran, 55:19-20)

He is the one who has set free the two kinds of water, one sweet
and palatable, and the other salty and bitter. And He has made
between them a barrier and a forbidding partition. (Quran, 25:53

Or (the unbelievers’ state) is like the darkness in a deep sea. It
is covered by waves, above which are waves, above which are clouds.
Darknesses, one above another. If a man stretches out his hand, he
cannot see it.... (Quran, 24:40)

Water is not like air, and computers that could handle meteorological computations were far too slow to work through comparable models for this swirling ocean "weather." As one ocean modeler complained in 1974, "Extensive research efforts have not yet yielded much more than a greater appreciation of the difficulty of these questions."(29) To get a handle on the problem, oceanographers had to understand the oceans from top to bottom. But they had little data on the depths — the occasional expeditions, retrieving bottles of water here and there from kilometers down, were like a few blind men trying to map a vast prairie. Oceanographers liked to remark that we had better maps of the face of the Moon than of the deep sea. After all, there was little economic incentive, nor much military interest either, in studying the colossal slow movements of water, salts, and heat through the abyss.

News At Six

The night is just as cold
when you wait as when you don't,
it conceals the shadows
when the sunshine won't.
My sky is prettier at six
performing all those dying tricks,
so perfect it can make me cry
as on the stars I spy and spy.
No one can tell me a single thing
about fin and leg and wing
without the tongue and mouth
in a breath gone south.

I guess the world is a sadder place
as shame beats steady on the clock's old face.

I read a pome about a hungover gent
whose bed was full of navel lint
and parched old birds he keeps talking to
when no one else will listen or do.