“First Chaos came, and then broad-bosomed earth,
the everlasting seat of all that is. And then came Love.
–Hesiod 725 B.C.E.
So I think about you and me
and the movement of the planets,
whether love can be destroyed
or only changed from shape to shape.
The First Law Of Thermodynamics.
We were a planetary conjunction,
two vibrating rocks in the muted chill of space,
or were we pulled together by a force
that Hesiod might call love,
though I’m not sure Plato would,
before we went retrograde and resumed our orbits,
inscribing arcs through the heavenly bodies.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics
Now you and I exchange cards on the holidays,
talk about going through the old photos
after all these years, dividing them up,
how we should go out to dinner shouldn’t we?
But we aren’t planets that conjoin now and then,
or perpetual motion machines of the second kind.
And Hesiod’s love may be just pressure and gravity,
the sigh of a distant prime mover
From the corner of infinite regress.
The Third Law Of Thermodynamics.
Energy can’t be created or destroyed
just changed from shape to shape.
But Quantum Physics strikes the exception
and maybe love can implode and vanish
after posing its last, bare question.