Skip to main content

Poem: States of Matter

Science in meter and verse

States of matter.
Credit:

Don Komarechka


On supporting science journalism

If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.


Edited by Dava Sobel

For any liquid, there are two ways to arrive:
condensation or melting, a gas finding
shape or a solid losing it. For any liquid,
leaving depends on pressures
and one of two ways out: to evaporate
is to lift from its own surface,
the bonds broken, the substance cooling
with each molecular departure;
to boil is to reach the elemental
point of no return, through and through.
For a solid, there's another trick to changing states
by skipping the liquid in-between:
the ablation of glaciers by wind that eats snow,
the whiff of mothballs from the closet,
arsenic like a hint of garlic in the air—
or in reverse, frost or soot or rime,
the coalescence of vapor, no longer suspended.
The mind is said to do this, too: to turn
one energy into another, like desire into art
to save oneself in another state of being.

Anna Leahy directs the M.F.A. in Creative Writing program at Chapman University in Orange, Calif., where she also curates the Tabula Poetica reading series and edits the international Tab Journal. She is author of Tumor (nonfiction) and the poetry collections Aperture and Constituents of Matter.

More by Anna Leahy
Scientific American Magazine Vol 324 Issue 3This article was originally published with the title “States of Matter” in Scientific American Magazine Vol. 324 No. 3 (), p. 22
doi:10.1038/scientificamerican0321-22