I am interluding from the fênix serial with some selfie portraiture, old and new.

sky blue air

I seek a sunlit place where I will breathe again.
It lies beyond the end of my imagination,
and before the incomprehensible begins.

soft machine

I wore the clothes she gave me,
I did my best and worst.
By reflection and refraction,
I hid within the whisper light.

mother’s advice

If you sleep inside a fridge, you must not close the door;
soft machines must walk the path beside the sea.

understanding science

Semiconductor junctions, garden hoses
spraying water over fences
while the sun hides nuclear fusion angels.

the queen of science

Integro-differential equations, my first and ever true,
in the days when mathematics was my queen,
my algebraic illusion.

When you left, I let you go, I didn’t tell you.
My goodbye was a silent closed-path integration
on a pulsing cardioid, a regression to infinity,
and now I only have my pride, my solitude,
and my C++ compiler.

about

• there is a limit to what we can imagine, or dream of
• soft machines appeared in the stray branch
• extract from Chapman and Cowling’s foundational work “The Mathematical Theory of Non-Uniform Gases,” The University Press (1953)
• figure from Cyril Bibby’s classic “Simple Experiments in Biology,”  Heinemann (1961)
• mathematics is the queen of the sciences