1,000 ångströms | Vito A. Rowlands

1,000 ångströms

Swedish scientist Anders Ångström circumnavigated the world for three years in the mid-nineteenth century.

On board a royal frigate, he looked for light, magnetic fields, and a way to measure the space between atoms.

Anders woke;

a wave

the length of

three

solid

bars (held in Paris)

rattled his skin along its frequencies

Inside

frost had found sub atomic specters

Anders woke;

the warship: still, haunting an iceberg under aurora

had its sails pitched a fever

for her majesty

At the helm, clouds scattered before Turner, Captain

taking in the red

Plinian

particles

of an early erupted dawn

100

Anders woke;

light divided cold air,

dead time,

trapped in prisms

As the berth shook

it relieved Anders of molecules that were not his,

but of stars, once again

The sun

would see,

radiant,

how ice swallowed whole

its rays

1,000

Anders woke;

peered beyond the pane

of the single

steel

oval

that struggled

to contain his heresy

Needles dropped in water,

filings strewn on paper,

described concentric circles

that did not, reveal

that could not, reveal his true North

lost

in layers of frost, rime and dirt

10,000

Anders woke;

felt the space between cells

Expanding lanes that congested

breath;

erased his presence;

save for magnets

that reeled in white whales

in the minds of mariners,

wary

of fields

they could not see,

or touch,

for the life of them

100,000

Anders woke;

wave-lengths frequenting his sleep

had spied

the bare hull

of a body

submerged

in glacial embrace -

unabating,

indifferent

to charged colors

or global circumvention

Cold

to histories that pass

in the lagging hours of night