Robert Frost famously called poetry “a momentary stay against confusion.” This week’s Deep Water poem is a momentary stay against entropy – in thermodynamics, the measure of disorder that increases as energy leaves a system. On the cusp of the longest night of the year, Jonathan Aldrich’s deceptively simple “Entropy” invites us to both sit with and momentarily hold off a larger disorder and darkness.

Jonathan Aldrich has taught English and liberal arts at various colleges, including Berea College in Kentucky and, for 25 years, Maine College of Art in Portland. He is the author of eight books of poetry. 

Entropy

By Jonathan Aldrich

She touches everything.

She touches you and me, the day,

the shiny railroad tracks with rust

and then the rust.

 

But do not say the future may

be all disorder – all of it –

until you must.

 

Megan Grumbling is a poet who lives in Portland. Deep Water: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “Entropy” copyright © 2019 by Jonathan Aldrich. It is forthcoming in “The Old World in His Arms: Collected Poems,” under the auspices of Indiana University South Bend and published by Wolfson Press, and appears by permission of the author.