centrifuge.ra (Real Audio format, 427k)

Unless I'm extremely careful, all my songs turn into melancholy meditations on the loneliness of the artist, and/or scientist. I'm sure this is hopelessly significant, and revealing, but as lyrical themes go I'm kind of fond of it, so I think I will leave it unanalyzed for now. This is probably the definitive scientist/artist one. At least, I hope it is. Although I don't push the association in the song, the idea of there being another of Chaucer's tales told by an inanimate object from the future really fascinates me.

Outside the window, the snow collects where the sidewalks were.
Condensation makes the rare headlight sparkle and blur,
And you stare through the reflection of your lab coat
In the window of the lab as your experiments hum.

A battered notebook swaps data and verse by page,
A scholar's journal from a half-invented age,
A dream of science as a romantic's tool,
The sterile beakers shattered by the jester's wand.
A union forged in a gauge and a phrase
In the flourish of a sine wave is true and then gone.

The timers trigger, another observation is drawn,
Seen through a needle and the centrifuge's song.
You touch the telltales as the chemicals distill clues.
The hardest part of science is what it never proves.

The way her eyes shut for a moment before she turned away.
The way your phone didn't ring the rest of the day.
The way the fumes unravel into the corners of the lab.
The way your pencil follows the curves in the columns of figures.

So much surrenders to the microscopes and knives,
So many moments, captured from so many lives,
And yet for all this desperate precision
So much still happens that nothing records.
The best equations spin without input,
And the best ladies still extend hands to the same lords.

The timers trigger, another observation is drawn,
Seen through a needle and the centrifuge's song.
You touch the telltales as the chemicals distill clues.
The hardest part of science is what it never proves.

Outside the window, it's a world of people and machines,
A constellation less of points than in-betweens.
Inside this sterile refuge of science
You hide from your failures in another thousand trials.

The notebook's open, her number on the left-hand page,
A list of reasons on the right, in the graph paper's cage.
You do the derivations for the hundredth time,
But no formula bridges the sewn seam,
No calculations yield a second chance,
No substitution can turn this lab into your daydreams.

The timers trigger, the readout curves go flat.
The lord of catalysts and villanelles feels like a test rat.
You could've touched her, instead of trying to measure your fear.
The hardest part of science is you alone here.

28-29 January 1995

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