WAGblog

Poem

The Principles of Being and Non-Being are One and the Same

The great Heisenberg* of small tenuous uncertainty
that what we know we don’t of time and place, what
we, waves, wrens or worms, the sleepy sucking currents
of deep ocean are is distorted by the social lies of light
that plays with everything like a child’s puppet
theatre making mock of all
that is ephemeral or enfeebled.

Yet what reflects in each thing of our longing
that we might see its face in day, midnight’s
candled moon and sparking stars
change into hidden language, like the deaf’s
manual music lacking melody, the voice of the silent body,
change it utterly without our knowing, how what is at night
is not, nor even a shadow of what is under light.

Where was Heisenberg? Who or what was he, caught
within this same improbable masque,
the circus of the real where fire-eaters consume flame
more honestly than we our fries, our fish
under the gilded double bow.

Each unknown enthralled non-thing of our troubling
existence is silenced by the humble-most questions
of all: space and speed, place and journey,
face and the faces turned away--

Where were you?
Why were you not here when we needed you?

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*Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle states, essentially, that we cannot know the position AND the momentum of a given subatomic particle at the same time, in short that we can't know both where it is and how fast it's going, we can only know one or the other.

Posted by pamwagg at June 8, 2006 09:57 PM