Two Poems for Science

by Silviana Amethyst

read at the 2018 Frederick and Joan Christopherson Schmidt Robert Frost Celebration of American Poetry at the University of Wisconsin -- Eau Claire.

deforming through life

walk, step by step, attempting to predict one, two
five, eight. then, off by a little.
kind of lost, but the path must be close by.
look around, are friends near? no eyes to
be seen, just jays, and square roots of -1.
a quick correction
back up onto the ridge
down was a slippery slope into a gulch
of incredible inaccuracy
with condition numbers on the order of
the pleasantness of the sun's rays on the
hottest days of summer
another step
there's a mountain on the left
as we speed by, guided by
green and white sans serif
and that nagging sense that
something just beyond belief
is destined to happen over
the course of my lifetime.
in the endgame, a spider web, a subtle manoevre
a possible tracking backwards
to all the startpoints i'll never experience

cateryx

under the adjoint tangential cateryx, there is a centipede the size of an asteroid.
it is holding a fan, smoothly interpolating between the constant sections of
the solution to a PDE with a shock, which is capable of not only dislocating
your second derivative, but also of solving the everlasting and eternal problem
of the energetic free minimum of the integral of your net rate of decay.
ergo, my nullspace, wrt some unmentionable nonlinear transformation,
is equivalent to the set of branch points of
the critical 3-fold of
the critical surface of
the critical curve of
the critical points of
an arbitrary function of time.