The Scientist

Before the time of skiing on Europa,

Enceladus still a far-flung starry dream, When humankind had met no interloper

To shake its trust in being God’s only scheme – When hope was cheap (since all the wildest hoper

Concocted was a proton-bashing beam), When life was good, before the hadron drama, A scientist lived and labbed in Alabama.

It’s said she changed her body to a vapour

And surged, at hurtling speed, across the prairie Dispersing dust and ruffling reams of paper

So jottings fluttered free above the airy September clouds. Her particles could caper

And coalesce as an engorged canary Which chirped — before her molecules defaulted To human form, with wing and thorax malted.

She set a gauze of copper near the sun

To gather photons whizzing off its centre, Which made a fleet of flying saucers run

In fluctuating orbits. Each would enter Its perihelion before it spun,

With bleeps of data, free, to its inventor Who plugged these findings in a database Comprised of maps for charting outer space.

She programmed microscopic drones to fill

Their pores with water, and transport the load To desert regions, where each cell would spill

A droplet, till a gushing river flowed. She bioengineered, with chlorophyll

Embedded in a goat’s genetic code, An animal that synthesized the light And grew, in hours, to an ungainly height.

And then she launched a harvester in motion

To capture hurricanoes as they blew Across the wide and wet Atlantic ocean

And redirect them– where? Ah, no one knew But sometimes when a town was in commotion

From seismic devastations, quick winds flew, Like valkyries, to help, and air would bubble As gusts restored old buildings from the rubble.

Later, she rode a chariot made of glass

And dragged about the ozone-layer by Boeing, Diffusing thunderclouds and dribbling sparse

Evaporation trails of purple, flowing Horizon to horizon. When the grass

Absorbed their showers, each spikelet started sowing Sentient saplings, clustered in societies That grew to breed high-yielding crop varieties.

She fixed a laser to a diplodocus

Constructed out of fibreglass and fossil, Then rode it round the town. It was a locus

Classicus for her to shove colossal Boulders, when thinking, in volcanoes: focus

Came easy watching quartz and lava jostle. That’s how she chanced on fresh techniques to mould Confectionery, and cured the common cold.

Controlled manipulations of dark matter Allowed her to reverse the flow of time:

She set a sludgy pig’s head on a platter

And watched it reassemble from the grime. She caged a fly and spider: watched the latter

Cough up the former, shrink, and uncombine The interwoven tightropes of its home. She made her hair retangle through a comb.

Another of her marvellous inventions

Distinguished large and small infinities And weighed up cosmological contentions,

Concluding that, for speculative ease, ‘The Multiverse’, with all its many tensions

And the glamour that it gives the lightest breeze, Awards the most discursive weltanschauung, A world of trillion-tasselled sturm-und-drang.

She carved a chamber in which gravity

Altered according to one’s state of mind: It was a vivid wonderment to see

A sapling leave its clod of soil behind And levitate across a vacancy

To feed an antelope that was confined And, growing hungry, startled to discover Its food approaching like a much-missed lover.

Experiments with time proved her undoing.

Sure, she could travel— but who really knew How far one’s present self was misconstruing

Precisely what one’s future self would do Or wish to do? This problematic gluing

Of future yearning (judged by what one knew Was probable) to present hope produced An attitude both fearful and confused.

And yet she would and should and did continue,

Concocting bots and bugs and neuromatic Computers, quantum monsters made of sinew

And nanotubule, shambling through her static Test-spaces. She’d a ray to look within you

And pinpoint thoughts and feelings: an ecstatic Shudder, a moment of unravelling doubt, A movement that prompts the moment when you shout.

But no one, as we know by now, is simple.

No one is not in some way complicated. The smoothest skin can rupture with a pimple.

Our oceans will, one day, be dessicated. A nun, come Friday night, discards her wimple

And boozes freely. Even Time — dilated, Contracted — will, with spatial twisting, differ At certain points, like swirlings in a river.

She was obsessed with Death. Or rather, not

With Death itself, but with its dissolution. She wished to put a kibosh on the rot

That saps us everywhere, this foul pollution Ubiquitously found, which cools the hot

And heats the cool, and proves us Lilliputian Flies to be swatted. Champions of dissection, We lack — still, still! — the art of resurrection.

The overthrowing of the overthrowing;

The great undoing of the great undoer; The banishment of nothing’s bleak unknowing;

The numinous pursuit; the reconstruer Of what informs us that we should be going;

The fight against what makes us thinner, fewer, And more despondent year on weary year. The death of Death. The death, perhaps, of fear.

So she conducted many a detailed test

To study Life and how it might be held. She mapped the way bacteria divest

Unneeded nutrients, how cells are swelled, And how flagella mobilise the quest

Through microscopic landscapes. She compelled All fields. She had a lithe celestial air. Who was Verona? What had made her care?

Verona’s parents were intense, utopian:

Her mother, pure Romantic philosophe; Her dad, a physicist, anti-entropian.

On summer evenings they’d sit late and quaff Smirnoff together, two straws like fallopian

Tubes that extended to a single trough. As they got smashed, their brilliant minds would glisten And young Verona dropped her toys to listen.

Her toys, which were bizarrely whirring things:

A helter-skelter made of ammonite, A schooner with retractable glass wings,

A futuristic baton-wielding knight, A tin containing ultraviolet strings

Which she could weave to trip and trick your sight, And a stack of space-age doodads from her dad, Designed at Cal Tech when he was a grad.

But now she was a grown-up, all alone,

And dedicated to those tricky arts Which humankind first called on to see stone

And stick make fire. She held the many parts Of earthly knowledge in that fertile zone

Behind her eyes, where synapse-linkage darts Between ideas and, in the course of time, Discovers separate realms that seem to rhyme.

Phenomenologists would journey far

To witness one experiment in action: She’d lock a putrid aardvark in a jar

Filled with potassium and some extraction Shipped in by shuttle from a distant star.

It fizzed and fulminated till reaction Gave way to calm: subsiding foam revealed A living aardvark, every lesion healed.

About her other triumphs, I will speak

At greater length hereafter: how she flew Through far-flung galaxies on just a weak

Duracell battery; how she laughed and threw Convention to the solar wind to peek

Inside our sun; and how she followed through On manifold harmonious inventions That filled the news reports in higher dimensions.