Risa Denenberg

Surface Tension

I failed physics twice, the contradictions
foiled me. Gravity, a force none could explain,
like God or love, more like love maybe, a plunging
flume causing distant objects to orbit, merge,
collide, fracture, even die.

Quite the reverse when I pour water into the saucer
beneath the pot of plum-colored African Violets. The plate
is wide and bowl-like, unlike slender tubes used to pluck
glistening blood-drops from fingers to test for anemia.
Capillary action, it appears, defies gravity: lamp wicks
and Brawny paper towels, tears splashing over corneas.
Rain tumbles cloud-to-earth, trees pull tons of groundwater
trunk-to-branch-to-leaf.

Denser than water, striders and basilisks sashay
Jesus-style upon a pond’s skin. Surface tension
is a bouncer, adhesion inspires cliques, a convex
meniscus aches upward. Water is sticky—
or is it small-minded and clannish?

Dogma in physics has oscillated wildly,
leaving me dizzy, nearly suicidal. The unknown
familiar: god, demon, nostrum, vapor, quark.
Despite gravity, things fall apart, the center
doesn’t hold. Forces oppose one another,
like attracts like, wars ensue.

While we quibble, ice caps thaw, magnetic poles shift,
species vanish, another blue crab is boiled alive
in the pot. We cannot seem to dodge science,
nor pin it down, despite our lepidopterist ways—
nets, killing jars, electron microscopes. The most
venerated quantum physicists are dumbstruck
by their own utterances.

I long along with multitudes gazing at a vast
penumbra. How do we manage to be so uncertain
of what we know and so sure of what we don’t know,
as we glide along this thin ice of our private eternity?