Seeing More By Seeing Less

Darnell was watching the sky 
through two straws skewed and wavering
in different directions
as if he were a predatory 
insect looking for another
to kill and eat head first, then
suck out the tasty fluids
until what remained was a husk.
Something to toss aside. If Darnell
weren't an astrophysicist,
if I didn't know that he was
someone who used math to see
how the cosmos came to be,
would I, like other customers
outside the CookOut waiting
for our orders to be shouted,
think Darnell in his Tardis Tee
"I'm bigger on the inside"
—he was big to begin with—
had escaped from supervision
of some sort? There was pity
in their kind eyes. Not that he
could see that through his two straws.
Misplaced pity was extraneous
data. Toss it out. It clouds.
It confuses. Real insights
demand that we ignore the noises
that confound bits of meaning
we extract from mysteries.
The next mystery for Darnell
would be two straws moved from his eyes
to his near solid Cheerwine Float,
the variety of sounds made
as he draws the heavy thickness
toward his mouth, the loud slow
gurgle, the collapse of surface
tension, as if by sweet leaving
something new could be created, 
like a space where stars are born.

On Reading an Article in Science: 
“How writing haiku has made me a better scientist”


If I wrote haiku,
would I do better at what
I'm supposed to do?

Would I have insight
into molecules and rules
for making new tools?

Understand nature
as beyond Occam's razor?
Nothing so simple

as syllable count
to get at complexity
with dexterity.

But when it comes to
Sciku and indirection
I merely achieve

a higher level
of imperfect perplexion
over one red leaf

on the pond's surface.
A dragonfly and beneath
a fish-dark shadow.

In 2019, a manuscript of Paul Jones’ poems crashed into the moon. His book is Something Wonderful, (Redhawk Publishing, 2021) which includes “Ode to Very Small Devices.” In 2021, Jones was inducted into the North Carolina State Computer Science Hall of Fame. He has published poems in Poetry, Tar River Poetry, Hudson Review, North Carolina Literary Review, and here in Indelible as well as in The Best American Erotic Poems: 1800 – Present (Scribner, 2008).