Standard candles
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About this ebook
Janice MacDonald
Janice has been writing for as long as she can remember. She's always kept a diary and still does. She says it's fascinating to look back to a specific day and year and see exactly what she did that day. She admits she's not compulsive about very much else, but says she writes in her diary on a daily basis. Janice majored in journalism at California State University, Long Beach, and worked as a reporter on a number of small and short-lived weekly papers for several years before deciding that there had to be more reliable, maybe even lucrative, ways to make a living. She switched to public relations in the early 1980s and eventually became director of media relations for a large west coast HMO. In that capacity, she had the memorable experience of saying no to Mike Wallace when the 60 Minutes crew showed up one day. She left the corporate world in 1990 and freelanced for a number of publications including the Los Angeles Times. She also ghost-wrote numerous medical articles for various professional journals. Today she combines fiction and nonfiction writing and works from her home in Vista, California, where she lives with her husband on three acres with an ever-changing cast of animals, including a pygmy goat. Most recently Janice has discovered the joys of living on the water. During the week, she's been staying on a Columbia 26-foot sailboat docked in Long Beach Marina, using her laptop and cell phone to work and keep in touch. Janice has two grown children, Christopher, who lives in Washington, and Carolyn, who is building a home in Flagstaff. She also has a granddaughter, Emily.
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Standard candles - Janice MacDonald
Acknowledgements
Sonnet for Valentine’s for David
Go, little poem, into the space between
planets, across the unbounded page
inscribed by stars. A tiny, ticking machine
of levers and polished surfaces—
clear evidence of intent, design.
Let the aliens who intercept it
learn the virtues of this love of mine,
his kindly constellation. Let them share
my wonder at the dense relationship
of soul to smile within the dear,
dear boundaries of skin. Go little ship
of space beyond the gravity of time,
and, beating always, prove
there is indeed a god
of love.
The set of all gods
We keep searching for the one creating deity, the theory of everything, the god particle, the basic equation to drive our unfolding universe. Surely, we think, we can isolate one single, monotheistic grain from which everything else is built.
What if, instead, our world is built by an interlocking pantheon, a set of gods? All of them (each of them) central, essential, supreme…
The god of prime numbers
—trinity, quintic, indivisible seven—
visits her creation
often in its early moments
then draws away for ever-lengthening periods
oh, how long must we inhabit
a dreary world of common factors
’til her return?
The god of infinities
is wizened, smaller than the space
between one-over-n
and one gets tinier and tinier
world without end
and then
The god of symmetry
says fiat lux
not with a mighty groan of light
but in a whisper
that blows the smallest crease
cramp crimp
into perfect equipoise
allows himself to break
a fissure king
The god of gravity
is weak and distant somewhere
out there
adding up masses
delicate crush
The god of salt
creates everything
in her own image
tiny crystal shaped
like still-tinier molecule
no apparent boundaries divide
creator from created form
and shape’s hegemony expands—
great clear cubes accreting
The god of kites and darts
launches into the air
flips back and forth between
good and evil tiles
the forking universe with
contradictions snug up
against each other
sharing edges
The god of quantum uncertainty
trickster here there nowhere
immoral immortal coyote
The god of probabilities
drags up mountains
of improbability
with sharp crags
and granite sides
thereby creating the likely valleys
where we can cluster comorbid
below the peaks where only she
may abide
The baker god
Who knows what shape we’re in?
Flat cookie, doughnut-torus,
or perhaps the crazy twistings of a cruller.
The baker god, kneader into shapes,
come down to earth and sitting
in the dunkin’ donut shop. Methodically
he tries them all—the two-holed torus,
the simple solid ones,
the folded-over-sealed ones with lemon filling
(how does it get inside?)
The universes sit in trays
with party-coloured sprinkles on their sugared tops.
The baker god turns them out repeatedly
in batches.
The god of automata
links atom to atom
like a knitting pattern
with simple rules
—when a, respond with b—
and algal blooms rise and fall,
vast populations of the stupid.
The god of automata
crochets a chain
of mindless proteins
into a loop. She winds a cord,
flicks messages along the fibres.
Muscles twitch as axon fires
the dim bulb of neuron.
Against time’s cycles,
she struggles
to make her frail creations
coherent, urges them
to unite into wisdom
before their nets collapse
under their own dumb weight.
The god of teapots
You are corpulent and unworried.
You accept what pours in
and pour it out—
amber, tan, sepia,
the percolations of brown,
the brewed colour of peat,
muskeg, spruce bog,
wetlands.
You retain traces
of vegetable digestion.
A crust of memory lines you—
a biofilm, a plaque
that flavours the ongoing.
Topologically speaking, you are
a two-holed torus.
Plain clay stretched, scooped,
spouted, handled.
Heat has come and gone
in your history. You take it in
and let it radiate away.
Your shape imprinted
in the hard heat of firing,
which you remember to this day.
The god of cats
World-Cat
uncoiled her tail and leapt
on the flecked back of Sky Antelope,
pulled it down in the death shriek
that began to hunt
time down.
Cat devoured
a space for us, her soft-pawed
descendants, in the belly of
her prey.
Its meaty haunch became
the earth on which we prowl.
Its flesh hatches into mice and voles
and small sweet birds.
Its rib cage
holds up the sky. At night,
we see a single arch of bone,
a white span of heaven.
World-Cat
slid her inner eyelid closed
and hid invisible behind it.
But still
sustains all being with her purr.
That deep and rumbling rhythm underlies
the rise and fall of birds in flight,
the interplay of hunger
and plenty.
We stretch
close to her heartbeat as we can
and repeat her mythic breathing—a tribute,
our ecstatic contribution