About the Author:
Kristina Marie Darling is an English major at Washington University in St. Louis. She is the author of three previous chapbooks: Fevers and Clocks (March Street Press, 2006), House of Mirrors (March Street Press, 2006), and House of Fame (Powerscore Press, 2006). Her poems and personal essays have appeared or are forthcoming in several online and print publications including The Mid-America Poetry Review, Wicked Alice, freefall, The Arabesques Review, Subtle Tea, and The Other Voices International Project. She also received a nomination for the Pushcart Prize in 2006.
Lorenz’s Hypothesis
(Def.: formal attempts to reveal structure in unpredictable changing systems such as cloud formation or the disorientation of various biological populations – an orderly periodicity rarely occurs in nature; in the quest to discover formulae, disarray has been often ignored.)
Tonight I am not unwanted.
This has never happened before, & won’t again.
Because things only happen a certain way
precisely one time. They are wrong for basic duplication.
We have all attempted & found the exquisite corpse
of someone professing his adoration at 12:56 AM.
The knowledge that it will all come out the same –
The theory of a determinate system.
By morning I have become
an unnecessary variable in someone else’s love affair.
And I wonder what’s next.
Somewhere at central or eastern time,
there are many unwise women
who have fallen almost simultaneously.
You can count on it happening to someone,
perhaps if you looked at the clock &
found a differential equation or an unwise woman.
When I ask him, the answer is solitude.
I don’t know many who would remain
when decision might thread him further
into the uncharted back-roads we create –
It’s inevitable w/in us; a few are renegades
and plead for my kind of sleeping want.
Someone once said that chaos,
if there is enough,
merges gracefully, like an interstate
that can be navigated.
The theory of a determinate system.