Dan Campion

Cloud Chamber

From Thales to Anaximander to
Democritus the world began to take
shapes modern scientists would recognize.
Each step ahead in physics would renew
the sense of coming gradually awake
and rubbing slumber’s sand out of our eyes.
The dome of the observatory, bone
inset with orbits where the optics peer
out at the world, contains a restless hive
that knows so little of itself the zone
might just as well be cased inside a sphere
of adamant, yet magically alive.
We make the hadrons circle through great rings
while Priam still grieves, as blind Homer sings.


Diner Coffee

We are collections of events that cling
together for a spell and then dissolve.
By instruments or by dead reckoning
we scurry while wide galaxies revolve
above our head, beneath our feet, and all
around us, almost as if to rebuke
us or embarrass us for being small,
uncouth, and by all odds a cosmic fluke.
A cup of diner coffee with a spoon
left on the saucer says a lot about
our situation. Never mind the moon
and sun. They’ll always leave your mind in doubt.
Pick up the spoon and give the dregs a stir.
Then go, loose coins left just the way they were.

Dan Campion’s poetry books are Calypso (Syncline Press), A Playbill for Sunset (Ice Cube Press), and The Mirror Test (MadHat Press). He is the author of Peter De Vries and Surrealism (Bucknell University Press) and a coeditor of Walt Whitman: The Measure of His Song (Holy Cow! Press). Dan’s poems have appeared in Able Muse, THINK, Poetry, Rolling Stone, and other journals. He lives in Iowa City, Iowa.