Poems

CALIBRATION

 
In faith and feint my soul
was spun, makeshift.

The strangeness within me
seeps slick. I re-magnetize
             my compass along a freezer’s
             seal. My home slit

             at the kitchen, swept corner-clean:
             wormy chestnut floorboards creak
inside my weekday dream, ghosts fatten
like whisked white peaks beneath and I

am lifted to another room,
quite nearly the same.
             What I did was what was done.
             No action from within, no cloud

         outrun, I left the house cold before
             the sky’s pliant skin was lost.
Between the clicks of subway turnstiles
I strove to count: luckless lap,

medieval face, clacking jaw.
The stovetop warms.
             Overnight, two orchids
             wilted on my desk.

             Overnight, someone snuffed
             my pilot light: smoke.
I have yet to examine my pale,
proprietary heart, but I know

it knocks, it slows. That stony
pulse designs its steadfast echo.

 
 
 
 
INHERITANCE: FATHER TURNS 60

Problem 1.1
all this, like carpentry:
                             an infant tooth extracted with
                                                                  shovels. tell me to start digging. my father & I will develop blisters, imagine striking
                                                      our bodies’ roots. adequate,
                                                                                                       by all means.
         how I crumble, wear garden gloves, start digging— to flame—
                                                                               (how do I) safely say: this should
disturb me.
                 suppose
                           it will, let us stipulate.
                                                      squeamish about all this, far enough away,
                                                      us, traveling like the bug’s shadow.

Problem 1.2

someone drops ( ) off a cliff.
                                     I snap a million photographs
                                     I measure the distance
                                     it strikes (it delivers)
question: solution:
surely even ( ) won’t know which is
                                           which. surely ethereal.
                                                                          it’s no good, it collapses—

my father, very roughly—speaking:
                                                    “this is safe.”

Problem 1.3
          safety & there is no guarantee there is no housed blame
                                                                  it only confirms what we already knew

 
 
 
let’s simply hope for the
                                 best. (the agnostic) refusal to answer: how many
                                                                                                angels sit on the point of a needle? my father, couched. (please) fall back.
                                                               sell me.
                                                               retreat. (how can you)

Solution: In this case
I warned you: these guts—(mouthfuls)
                                                   introduce a kind— of indeterminacy
                                                                                                      blip-by-blip
that is to say “—it’s possible, but painful”
                  hellish, equal parts living & dead (I have tried)
that is to say I warned you

                  how could we have been so
                                                                         (I prefer to avoid
                                                                                               such language)

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Note:

This is a liberal erasure of Griffiths’ Introduction to Quantum Mechanics, one of the most used textbooks for physical/mathematical approaches to quantum systems. I depended upon it as an early physicist. At the core of quantum mechanics is reliable, quantifiable uncertainty. Additionally, quantum mechanics shows that you can’t know where small things are unless you are actively looking at them; the moment you look away you can know only where you observed them to once be.