Zero Kelvin

Present-day astronomy, vast, complex, is looking through darkness to distant objects and times. Yet its discoveries aren’t exclusively scientific: from Pluto’s moons to Curiosity Rovers, the sky remains a place where math meets myth. Now, in Zero Kelvin, Richard Norman’s poetry probes both the facts and the metaphors generated by astronomical research—which is bringing us daily new heavens on earth.

Experiment

It is a human urge—
to orbit backwards at great speed.
Experimentally, you do it
and then the crack of lightning,
the open-ended snowflake, splits the sky . . .
Seconds drop like filings
when a magnet is turned off.