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Overloading the Machine

Loved Poem No. 2

Of all the things
to be careless, the
distance chose you,
became rough with
a haughty splendor
unseen since your first
days of pen and pulse
and pendulum strokes
of maybe she will
and maybe she
don't. Always a
nice chin to keep up,
an appearance neither
too wet nor too
yours. Come, share with me
these dancing streaks.
I don't feel like leaving
before I know
the brush.

In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. Therefore ... in the Old Silurian Period the Mississippi River was upward of one million three hundred thousand miles long ... seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long. ... There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesome returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.

-- Mark Twain

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