<\/div>\n

Mercurial View of Autumn<\/strong><\/p>\n

My friend Kathy has a zine she likes to theme around the seasons.<\/p>\n

She is a wonderful and nice person, and I’d like to have a poem about the seasons I could give to her to publish, but the minute I start thinking of seasons I stop finding anything poetic. It’s a problem with occasional poems quite generally, not just poems about seasons.<\/p>\n

It’s as if poems about occasions are predictable, and the thing that makes a poem a poem more than anything else is the fact that it can’t be predicted. So, with the nature of seasons constrained, anything I write about them is predictable, and not very poetic.<\/p>\n

I’ve written some poems where I talk about how the seasons are reversed in the southern hemisphere; and some others about how seasons are intermingled with the concepts of day and night at the poles (midnight sun and all that), but after a handful of those they start becoming pretty predictable, too.<\/p>\n

So I started trying to think about what I didn’t think about on the subject, and the first thing I thought of was that I wouldn’t really know what it was like to not have seasons. And I thought, ‘this is good, this is good’, I haven’t ever thought about that.<\/p>\n

And so I recalled that seasons are mostly caused by differences in angles, which sent me scurrying to the internet to find the relevant names: the ecliptic plane, and the earth’s equatorial plane. Seasons are mostly about the angle between those two planes.<\/p>\n

So now we have the basis of a poem.<\/p>\n

But I want to go deeper and start wondering if there are planets without such an anglular difference, and so back to the internets to discover that there is a huge variety among the angles for the different planets, with Uranus having a big tilt (no joke), and Mercury having no tilt.<\/p>\n

So, Mercury doesn’t have any tilt-angle basis for seasons. As if that weren’t enough, Mercury doesn’t have an atmosphere, so it doesn’t have any basis for weather, either.<\/p>\n

The lack of an atmosphere is a crazy thing. If there were polar ice caps on Mercury, they wouldn’t melt because the polls are dark, and about a hundred degrees below 0. Even as close to the sun as Mercury is, the polls are way below 0, because there is no atmosphere.<\/p>\n

Loosely speaking, there is about a thousand degree difference between day and night on Mercury, and days last about half a Mercury year, or maybe a third, it gets complicated.<\/p>\n

So, seasons tie us to the weather, and the angles of the cosmos, and the fact we are all sheltered and nourished by this big invisible sac of kinetic almost-nothingness with a lot of oxygen and nitrogen. And fall doesn’t even totally need to exist: planets without fall are readily imaginable.<\/p>\n

So, thank you atmosphere. Thank you fall. Thank you existence of weather.<\/p>\n

Thank you impossible writing assignment with no surprises: thanks for all you have taught me.<\/p>\n

~ Terry Provost<\/p>\n