What the Churning Waters Will Bring

A million thoughts wait to cross Northumberland Strait.
Though the 5-story ferry, the Abegweit ,'land cradled on the waves', 
holds 350 (from tractor-trailers to sub-compacts) and near a thousand people,
each waits,
in one of twenty-five lanes of twenty,
for its own word.

When I kayaked down the Gunnison, I pulled deeply,
for only by going faster than the river
could I avoid being ground against the Black Canyon's slick sheer walls.

The three-inch sequoia I planted in the Catskills is brown on top 
but light green branches grow from the body.
Despite drought, they fluoresce in the sun.
My father, who is 83 and from the old school,
uses the rice wash 
to water it everyday. 

Where rivers and inter-tidal beaches churn,
water foams in rebellion against the earth.
When I eat the foam, I want to populate the world
or to destroy it.

We have produced the Bose-Einstein Condensate,
a theoretical possibility that never existed before.
Rubidium atoms a billion times colder than the most remote interstellar space
smear and overlap into a stew with a single quantum state.
In Chicago, 739 people die from the heat for the first time.
A churning of cold miracles and death by heat.

A 10-year old female gymnast whirls in competition.
She has no time for the 22 stress fractures in her spine.
When she finishes, she has
a cabinet full of gold trophies as tall as she
and bones with post-menopausal density,
a mixture of perfect 10's and madness.

The Croats forge their own solution:  Serbs as refugees.
The mad hatter certifies his butcher is insane while the butcher 
accuses the mad hatter of associating with him too long.
Our leader knows we are a nation of escalator riders.
Only the rich can afford the machines that simulate stair climbing.
He knows the consequences of a war in real hills.
Unlike his idol, JFK,
he's lost the will to ball an unlimited stream of women.

Though Hurricane Felix covers a staggering 107,000 square miles
churns wind and water like an oceanic egg beater, 
pounds 1,000 miles of shore,
and deals out deaths or double overheads,
it is only a rehearsal.
Critics laugh at 'Water World',
skeletons of cities 400 fathoms deep?!;
a Hollywood film, that forgot to show, in the last
dry land scene,
		the chemical trails of ants that will cover everything.


Han-hua Chang
8/18/95