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Particles

The reason you do not clearly understand

the time-being

is that you think of time only as passing.

DŌGEN, AD 1240

We must endure our thoughts all night, until

The bright obvious stands motionless in cold.

WALLACE STEVENS, 1946

Winter solstice — the sun

stopped for a moment —

can you feel its light stretching —

as it shrugs off its migration

and turns back north toward the pole?

On this rock, just the right

distance from the nearest star,

sheltered by Jupiter and kept in season

by the steadying moon,

being moves through my body

like clouds, arriving in one shape,

drifting off as another.

I don’t remember being born,

only the great dog

whose fur I clung to

before the first day of school.

Memory accounts

for space, not time.

It records the quality and angle

of light, the keen, metallic scent of wind

through porch screens — the wailing

as it rises — the warmth and texture of air —

the weather and sometimes

whether or not it was a Tuesday,

but never how long it lasted — or

how many years ago — only

how it felt — alone in that moment.

And the sound of waves breaking.

We see time past as Euclidian — moments

of solitude with no date affixed —

long afternoons of childhood in no time at all,

when it first occurred that you were seven,

without knowing that,

because of the moment — now in memory —

you will always be seven in that place.

Our solitude — being alone

with the one you knew there —

our loneliness — being there

without him.

Two billion seconds of life

now, on a planet only

four and a half billion years

old — and every atom on loan

to it much older than that.

In the beginning, all that was

was too hot for atoms — too tightly

packed to let go of its light —

as if the universe

had come out the other side of a black hole —

heading back to where it began

over ungraspable distance

right now — and not at all

far from home.

Every creation story I know

comes out of the dark —

the brune garden in which light blooms.

Dark matter pulling chaotic

energy apart — breaking the prison

of its own concentration —

giving it space to be a wave.

The master equation

of the Standard Model of particle physics

accounts for everything

except gravity — and gravity

accounts for everything —

irresistible center of the spheres

and stars, on and among which

we go on — curving our

straight course — as it draws

the low-gliding hawk

irresistibly

back together with its shadow.

Imagine Earth

as the nucleus of a hydrogen atom

from which we’re looking out — hoping

for a glimpse of the single electron

whirling around in its orbit

and — like Neptune — simply too

distant to see — a green pea

in a green field a half-mile away.

Now in confusion — now

in a wave — a thousand blackbirds

rise and veer above a stubble field —

their wings like obsidian in the sun.

Illusory solidity of the world

and things — the chair I’m on —

its atoms whizzing in arcs,

repelling each other while I sit

musing in this electromagnetic storm —

a chair.

So much space inside an atom,

why can’t I reach through this wall?

Is a honeybee

one being, or an element

of one being?

Particles — shadows of waves

in water moving over bright sand.

As a child I witnessed a tiny sort of

particle accelerator

in the cold, blue light

of The Lone Ranger

on black-and-white TV — a beam

of electrons through a cathode tube

splayed out by a magnet to become

Tonto and Silver crossing

a phosphorescent screen.

Every particle in their bodies represents

the distillation of 100

billion bits from the big bang that

immolated themselves

to become light.

Now even quantum theory agrees,

Form Is Emptiness — mostly.

In the glittering domain

of the Summer Triangle — buoyed up

by crickets and frogs —

Vega drags her rhomboid harp

through an isthmus in the Milky Way.

We need our quietest hours to hear Earth

turning night into day —

to feel it gather its waters against

the pull of the moon —

hydrogen holding the waters together,

and we — made mostly of water —

hydrogen molecules drawn to each other —

wrapping up a bit of breathable

air in their hydraulic embrace —

holding me together, and you,

with a little oxygen drawn in.

How is it that an atom of hydrogen —

the primary substance of all we know —

can be said to weigh less

than the sum of its parts,

and does that mean the total mass

of the known universe — mostly hydrogen —

would weigh less if we could weigh it

all together at once?

Matter appears to be jealous of light —

every particle mad to escape its mass

to be just the light by which we

see our world — without self —

without the distractions of a you

and me, apparently eternal

like an electron — to have

no substance in which to decay.

The mysterious shore across the great void —

a scary place from all you’ve heard,

all you’ve imagined —

never quite clearly in view,

and no one you know

has been there.

And how will you endure your thoughts

in the great dark absence

of everything you’ve known?

Like the terminals of the battery

in a lamp,

matter and antimatter

cancel each other out

to become light.

Why anything at all should exist

is a riddle we haven’t yet solved.

Going and coming, the full moon

and rising sun

greet each other

across the plane of the morning.

“Till later,” says the moon.

“I’ll be along,” says the sun.

“I’ll be around,” says the earth.

“Take your time.”

Near the pole,

the needle of the magnetic compass

spins like drain water

in its dying frenzy —

finally so close to home.