22 Scientific American, March 2021
METER
Edited by Dava Sobel
Anna Leahy directs the M.F.A. in Creative Writing program
at Chapman University in Orange, Calif., where she also curates
the Tabula Poetica reading series and edits the international
Tab Journal. She is author of Tumor (nonfiction) and the poetry
collections Aperture and Constituents of Matter.DON KOMARECHK AS TATE S OF M AT TER
For any liquid, there are two ways to arrive:
condensation or melting, a gas finding
shape or a solid losing it. For any liquid,
leaving depends on pressures
and one of two ways out: to evaporate
is to lift from its own surface,
the bonds broken, the substance cooling
with each molecular departure;
to boil is to reach the elemental
point of no return, through and through.
For a solid, there’s another trick to changing states
by skipping the liquid in-between:
the ablation of glaciers by wind that eats snow,
the whiff of mothballs from the closet,
arsenic like a hint of garlic in the air—
or in reverse, frost or soot or rime,
the coalescence of vapor, no longer suspended.
The mind is said to do this, too: to turn
one energy into another, like desire into art
to save oneself in another state of being.