"What Elements You Blend"

Last night, standing in a long, tortuous line at the Wal-Mart pharmacy, I thought to myself, "Maybe I should become a pharmacist! Clearly, there are not enough of them in the workforce. Why else would this line be so infernally slow?"

This idea isn't as crazy as you might think. I've always been good at chemistry. I usually had the top grade in my high school AP chemistry class, and I continued to do well in chemistry, biology, and genetics courses at KU. For a few years, I even wanted to be a chemistry major. I was fascinated by how many billions of chemicals and compounds existed in the world, and how they always reacted together in the same ways. Combine three white powders, add heat, and boom! You get a blue-black chunk of soot. Each reaction is reassuringly reliable and completely mysterious at the same time: there is no chance that the three powders will make something other than the blue chunk, but, looking at the powders separately, it seems impossible that they could conceal such a surprising product. So, to me, chemistry seemed both magical and mechanical, awe-inspiring and comfortingly sane.

This mysterious reliability is the same reason I love to bake. Baking is essentially chemistry: if you mix ten ingredients together in the correct proportions and add heat, the results will yield a delicious dessert that looks like none of its component parts. In the absence of human error, baking is as regular as the seasons, as breath, as hunger.

While my first poetry workshop at KU didn't erase my love of chemistry, it certainly overwhelmed it. Where chemistry was intriguing but tamable, writing felt alchemical and downright wild. Writing a successful poem was a rush because it was so much more difficult than following a set of instructions to reach a certain chemical product. Language is just so wily, so slippery and difficult that a good poet can be unsuccessful for 29 days out of a month only to succeed outrageously on the 30th day.

Besides the artistic thrill of it, I liked how immediate literature felt, how it could change a reader's life almost instantly. I know that chemistry makes lives better (I've seen your commercials, Du Pont!), and that there is meaning to be found in understanding the minute workings of the natural world. But reading a poem makes you feel something right away, though even the fastest pills take a half hour to enter the bloodstream. Besides, without pleasure and understanding, how fulfilling is a healthy but unexamined life? And so I set myself to the task of gathering words and images, mashing them together in a few hundred syllables, and hoping for an explosion.

Among all these thoughts of chemistry and poetry, of transformation and reliability, I thought of Robert Frost's "Choose Something Like a Star." It's always been one of my favorite poems. I love the speaker's tonal modulations, how his voice shifts smoothly to match the popular mob and the distant star. But I also love Frost's underlying message that, no matter how much we uncover about the mysteries of the natural world, nature's ancient archetypal meanings still loom large in our minds. What we know about stars changes every day, but starlight's essential human importance--its offerings of perspective and patience--cannot be changed by any fact.

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Choose Something Like a Star

by Robert Frost

O Star (the fairest one in sight),
We grant your loftiness the right
To some obscurity of cloud --
It will not do to say of night,
Since dark is what brings out your light.
Some mystery becomes the proud.
But to be wholly taciturn
In your reserve is not allowed.

Say something to us we can learn
By heart and when alone repeat.
Say something! And it says "I burn."
But say with what degree of heat.
Talk Fahrenheit, talk Centigrade.
Use language we can comprehend.
Tell us what elements you blend.

It gives us strangely little aid,
But does tell something in the end.
And steadfast as Keats' Eremite,
Not even stooping from its sphere,
It asks a little of us here.
It asks of us a certain height,
So when at times the mob is swayed
To carry praise or blame too far,
We may choose something like a star
To stay our minds on and be staid.