[Graybeard]

Entropy

Your coffee grows cold on the kitchen table,
which means the universe is dying.

Your dress on the carpet is just a dress,
it has lost all sense of you now.
I open the window, the sky is dark
and the house is also cooling, the garden,
the summer lawn, all of it finding an equilibrium.
I watch an ice-cube melt in my wine,
the heat of the Chardonnay passing into the ice.

It means the universe is dying: the second law
of thermodynamics. Entropy rising.

Only the fridge struggles to turn things round
but even here there's a hidden loss.
It hums in the corner, the only sound
on a quiet night. Outside, in the vast sky
stars are cooling. I think of the sun
consuming its fuel, the afternoon that is past,
and your dress that only this morning
was warm to my touch.

By Neil Rollinson