Magdalena Ball


Infinite Series

Come now
water is a silk slip
sweeter in the evening
when you’re lost
every trip you every took
to find yourself

violet into pink
the night is silver before it falls
then brown to black
there’s no shame here

the beach is a time machine
cold air on your tongue
sugar in your tea
it’s still there
all the hours you spent under the boardwalk
away from home, young lips dried with salt
beating your hands against the sand

is there anything else, now, before
at the end
step carefully

the ocean comes in like a wave of energy
memory your surfboard
taking you out
the propagation direction
your body dissipates from the past
into the future
a creature of light.



Aphelion

I was a tree
at the edge of the sun's disk
bent and sorry, alive at aphelion
watching the light dim one last time
the signaling networks disconnected

too late to apologise, the words
carried on a strong wind, like seeds
stripped and clinging, a habitat
defined, digested, then destroyed

who is the speaker now
cold feet in the sand
light scatters a slow path
through the atmosphere

do not try to touch me
I remember
bloodwood, bark lifting
proud against the inevitable

pride is a human construct
requiring speech, action, destruction

whispering into the rustle of leaves
our silent sacred groves.



Three Body Problem

i

in which the problem becomes unsolvable
two other point masses
drawing the eye outward

if I lacked spatial extension
being zero dimensional no space
things might have been different

from the initial set of data
there’s you
your position over there
the relative isolation of a chair in space
self-imposed perhaps but nevertheless

then there’s me, anchored by mass

this is really a two-body problem
the additional force comes from
unspoken words emitting a force

a deviation from hypothetical
unperturbed
two-body trajectory

if you could pinpoint the exact
centre of the quiet storm
we might escape
perturbation

ii

a point object is an object
whose dimensions are ignored
or neglected
while considering its motion

I know that point, I know
the object, though can’t say
by abstraction in order to get to it

iii

a massive body extends
into the space around itself
only an approximate solution




Magdalena Ball is a novelist, poet, reviewer and interviewer, and is the Managing Editor of Compulsive Reader. She has been widely published in literary journals, anthologies, and online, and is the author of several published books of poetry and fiction, including the recently released poetry book Unmaking Atoms (Ginninderra Press).
 
 
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