Poem: "A Fine Man's Line"

[ysabetwordsmith]

This poem came out of the January 5, 2010 Poetry Fishbowl.  It was inspired by a prompt from whuffle which featured one of my science heroes, Richard Feynman.  It was sponsored by laffingkat as part of the 2010 Holiday Poetry Sale.

A Fine Man's Line
-- in honor of Richard Feynman

Linear time is an illusion of the flesh,
briefly dispelled by flickers of physics --

when you are standing on the Feynman point,
     the infinite wheel seems to make sense
     but π remains irrational nonetheless

field equations are symmetrical,
     for time is as infinite as the universe
     even though it flows only one way
     through the body's bottleneck

and nanotechnology implies minute devices
     that might outlive us all,
     for what will come is already written
     in what was and what is --

so we remain
gawkers in a world of wonders
that we can barely comprehend,
feeling our way along a fine man's line

toward enlightenment.