Gallium Anomaly

In a plentiful, fanatically
Conservatorial cosmos, things keep

Coming up unaccounted for, either
In the sense of seeming to be there, but

Only indirectly detectable
In the otherwise inexplicable

Behaviors of detectable neighbors,
Or, in the sense of being predicted

By formulas brilliant for predicting
All sorts of phenomena, but not this,

Whatever it is, invisible mass,
Invisible source of vast energy.

How is this? Are all things conserved or not?
Physicists confer, compare observations,

Redesign models and experiments.
The universe files all of them away.

Futillery

When the future, and perhaps
Only when the future fails
To tower capaciously,

Whether palatially thus
Or ominously, so small
You can’t pretend anymore,

The math works like calculus
As your thoughts approximate
Nearer and nearer zero

In infinitesimal
Futures, and you glimpse the line,
Area under the curve,

Cannonball’s trajectory
Of your existence as was.

Accepting the Diagnosis

Knowledge of a changed world spreads,
At first, like oil on water,
A glossy, stillish surface.

Later, either the oil burns
So that the new world turns hell,
Or waves whip up that break it

Into archipelagos
Of thick gleams within the spray,
Smaller and smaller islands.

Nothing unchanges change.
The latest dispensation
Is read into the record

Of the oceanic churn
However dispersed it grows,
However hotly it burns.

So it’s there. That knowledge is
There, but that it was of change,
Will itself be forgotten.