Time and Materials by Robert Hass

Author:Robert Hass [Robert Hass]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780061754227
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2007-04-29T04:00:00+00:00

8.

The book will tell her that the gleaming appliance

That kept her milk cold in the night required

Chlorofluorocarbons—Lucretius, your master

Epictetus was right about atoms in a general way.

It turns out they are electricity having sex

In an infinite variety of permutations, Plato’s

Yearning halves of a severed being multiplied

In all the ways that all the shapes on earth

Are multiple, complex; the philosopher

Who said that the world was fire was also right—

Chlorofluorocarbons react with ozone, the gas

That makes air tingle on a sparkling day.

Nor were you wrong to describe them as assemblies,

As if evolution were a town meeting or a plebiscite.

(Your theory of wind, and of gases, was also right

And there are more of them than you supposed.)

Ozone, high in the air, makes a kind of filter

Keeping out parts of sunlight damaging to skin.

The device we use to keep our food as cool

As if it sat in snow required this substance,

And it reacts with ozone. Where oxygen breeds it

From ultra-violet light, it burns a hole in the air.

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