Lovelace Nocturnes

by Mary Alexandra Agner

           for Jeannine Hall Gailey

The robot scientist's handmade daughter dreams of poetry the way that Ada Lovelace's mother dreamt of madness overtaking all her daughter's breaths—the sounds and similes narcotics sweated out in rhyme and meter before crashing in some other woman's bed—and builds wall after wall of words to trap the math, to dessicate derivatives, rip quickness from the vectors' tails, crush cross-products with weighted OEDs. But sounds associate. The letters line dance, re-align in patterns, pressuring the air until it vibrates into Ada's voice:

with Ada.Text_IO, Calendar;
use Ada.Text_IO, Calendar;

procedure ifElseIndecision is
       DAUGHTER        : INTEGER       := 1;
       type COMPLICATED is (CLEAR_DAYS, COLD_SHOULDERS, CHIMES);
       FAMILY          : COMPLICATED;
       NOW             : INTEGER;
       FUTURE          : INTEGER       := 1E+9;

begin
       NOW := Integer(Calendar.Seconds(Clock));

       while NOW < FUTURE loop
               if (NOW mod 2) = 0 then         FAMILY := CLEAR_DAYS;
               elsif (NOW mod 3) = 0 then      FAMILY := COLD_SHOULDERS;
               else                            FAMILY := CHIMES;
               end if;

               case FAMILY is
                       when CLEAR_DAYS         => Put_Line("Exhale.  Now is your time.");
                       when COLD_SHOULDERS     => Put_Line("Push back.  Now is your time.");
                       when CHIMES             => Put_Line("Marvel.  Now is your time.");
               end case;

               NOW := DAUGHTER + NOW;
       end loop;
end ifElseIndecision;

But every metal daughter's watched a ceiling crystallize from dark to dawn, huddled in dirty sheets unmoving while her lover snores into the growing light, deciding just what it will mean to her to be her father's girl—still breathing shallowly long past the moment the decision's made.

           Hear the root chord of our nocturnes
           (novae, blackbird wings, and water)
           trapped in math and lyric patterns.
           Passion outs us, every daughter.

Editors' Note: A portion of this poem is written in functional Ada code. To see the result, the section beginning "with Ada.Text_IO, Calendar;" and ending with "end ifElseIndecision;" may be compiled at ideone.com.  To do so, paste the selection in the main text box, select 'Ada' from the sidebar of computer languages, and click on submit.  Due to one of the functions being defined by the time of day, the result may take a short while to display.

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Mary Alexandra Agner writes of dead women, telescopes, and secrets. She's inverted a light curve from Pluto's atmosphere and modeled a low-density residuum in the Earth's upper mantle. Her writing has appeared in The Raintown Review, The Flea, Astropoetica, and Science. She can be found online at www.pantoum.org.

Read Mary's discussion of this poem over at the Roundtable!