A Giant Impact Followed by Resonant Despinning

 

They had arrived at the spot. 

Wittgenstein killed the engine,

Kant got the corpse out of the trunk

and lit another cigarette,

“your turn now,” he grunted

in the general direction of Ludwig.

The gardener, basking in the moonlight,

promptly proceeded to chop up

the remains of their silly little

heterosexual experiment.

“You know,” Wittgenstein confided,

“I got this great idea

for a seminal novel.”

“Spare me.” “I can’t.” “Then don’t.”

“I will, or is that, I won’t?”

logically-philosophically

dropping the torso in the lake,

the nipples in their rigor erect.

“Anycow, so here’s

Lance’s severed cancerous testicle.”

“You mean, surgically removed?”

The lady’s head described a fine arc

before it splashed.

“We take its perspective.”

“Er...”

Tides raised by the sun had a minor effect

on the earth-moon system, changing

the angular momentum by, at most,

about one percent.

“The narrator is Lance’s former 

one-of-a-pair,

in pseudo-Buddhist serenity

reflecting on the poetic beauty

of the simple bag of seed...”

Kant frowned, sensing a slight irritation

in his bowels, 

a thought developing as he burned

a hole in his woolly jacket.

“Listen, I’m not done yet,” 

Wittgenstein hastened to say,

“the simple bag of seed

has the strange power 

to do what all the violence

of Iraq and Afghanistan could not,

toppling this sweet sort of macho

four-star general, 

what’s his name?”

“Sandusky,” 

Kant suddenly realizing how he could

make the moon from a fast-spinning earth.

“No, no.”

The proto-earth would be spinning faster, 

so the giant impact could produce

a moon-forming disk from the Earth’s mantle.

Then, the system would lose angular

momentum and, 

Immanuel simply knew,

it would reach the present equilibrium

through orbital resonance between 

the sun and the moon.

“Right, sorry, 

I meant Paterno, of course.”