Examples: Inductive and Deductive

Got my computer back but little time to blog as I will be leaving on a week's trip. Before I do, here are two poems of mine that exemplify the inductive and deductive methods of composition.


Inductive:


At the Aquarium of the Pacific

I saw a brilliant angelfish whose tail
and fins shimmered yellow until it turned
and silver spread like an undercoat of fur
when stroked against the nap, across its scales.
Black as caviar and rimmed with gold,
its eyes, though flat as dimes, looked deep as wells.
The clownfish cruising by above the shells,
its idiotic smile painted bold,
passed disinterested as if it’d seen
it all before. Maybe. But I've heard
fish see only black-and-white, so why
this purple puffer and iridescent green
parrot fish-- and for whom? It's absurd
to credit chance. Either for us or for the light



Deductive:


On the Anthropic Principle

Here at the spoke-ends of our galaxy
it is easy to forget the central axle
moving insensibly slow, still
the silvery-white dispersion of stars
soothes randomly until we impose a pattern,
like the Magi, like the Greeks.

And despite the most accurate of calendars,
dawn remains a wager until the great lion of the sun
peers over the plains with a growl of heat
and the day blooms and withers toward the violet hour
where even wise men arrive as strangers
because the arrangement is never the same.

As the latest layer of bones,
can we ever appreciate how far
the swan's neck stretched to uphold the head,
the spider's strand thinned without snapping?
Do we recall the dark alternatives dodged,
any of which could unmake us?
Always there were detours
where the river never creased the rock
that never rose from the sea
that never spawned a single fossil.

When light illuminates the Grand Canyon
in winter's slant at sundown,
the stripes of ages burn
with every visible color.
What is the color of a radio wave?
Only a man asks that.