Scientists Found Ripples in Space and Time
And You Have to Buy Groceries
We’ve just learned that the whole universe is humming around us. Now what?
— Adam Frank, The Atlantic
The grocery list grows and shrinks, pulsating.
This week bananas, apples, tampons,
extra hamburger, and poster board.
There could be more to this.
The night sky is a haze
because we all leave our porch lights on
waiting for some hero, an astronaut maybe?
Some Orion to unsheathe a blade
and slay the bill collectors
or the horny old men at the gas station—
who drunk ask me to come home with them:
I respond, you do not want this liability.
From my car in that gas station parking lot,
gnats look like shooting stars in the upward haze—
crashing, waiting for wishes and children.
The groceries in the backseat melting,
the stolen gas station toilet paper in my purse,
my lipstick cakes and blisters my bottom lip.
It’s not the universe humming, it’s the broken
hot water heater that sometimes gets too hot
and other times blows a fuse and smokes.
This week’s groceries include extra milk,
crayons, diet coke, a raspberry chocolate bar,
light bulbs, batteries, and bug spray.
Compass: True North
for Mary Jane Oliver (September 10, 1935 – January 17, 2019)
“Something strange is going on at the top of the world.
Earth’s north magnetic pole has been skittering away.”
—Alexandra Witze
I opened up my heart. “Anemia,” the nurse said. “Not eating
enough meat? Bleeding too much, not enough……” No.
“My blood thins driven by liquid iron sloshing within my core.”
The problem lies partly with irrational sadness
and partly with other seismic shifts deep within…
The nurse writes in my chart and leaves the room.
The core generates most of the magnetic field,
which changes over time as the deep flows shift.
So much has changed. Navigation is impossible.
It started with… so many red flags and a poem.
Not a pole. A poem. A cup of coffee. A phone call.
I pulled to astronavigate, but cloud cover is 90%.
I read Mary’s “Wild Geese” five hundred days in a row.
In 2019, the poem crossed the International Line and I am
currently making a beeline for Siberia. So they think. I think
The fault lines are so inaccurate that cell count exceeds
the acceptable limit for navigational errors
and has shattered my internal compass.
“Wild Geese” became my compass. Now
the poem has sloshed. Sometimes you have to go
into the frozen tundra to go home. Do I have to be good?
This, my magnetic field changed so dramatically.
Because I was tired and lonely and done. And that means
I am essentially losing a magnetic tug-of-war.
My careful braid would have come undone, my blood thinned,
no matter the poem. Maybe. Always. Yes. Oh yes.
For Frack Sake, Honey— Couples Therapy for Bulldozers
Previously hidden faults
will fracture when stress
is overcome by the pressure
of everything.
Fracturing
at great depth frequently
triggered and suppressed by pressure
due to the weight of the overlying
everything.
Triggering
earthquakes,
along with hazards to public health
and the home environment
of everything.
Along the deepest
fault the big machines
up the hill, strike down pounding over and over
making music, bass beat, and thunk,
everything.
Up here, sedimentary
beds run nearly
horizontal, made up in twisted sheets,
smoothed corners every morning,
everything
dusted clean.
Horizontal and previously unknown
faults rise to the occasion and tenor
become weapons of economic destruction
everything.
Rising
oil spills wine-dark over soil,
Carried by sand and water by striking
hard, over and over, over everything.
Cantor’s Set Theory
{x:x=all the grief, the wailing and moaning, the broken hearts
this set contains me and the number 3.
The number 3=y and y is all of my children.
x + y * the whole of who I am at any given time}
Cultivating Spooky Action at a Distance, a Love Letter
The blue rocking chair sometimes
sounds like your boot-fall on porch boards,
a steady pacing, the autumn wind impatient.
A bee lands on my dress sleeve,
tiny cornflowers on white cotton worn thin—
I see nothing but star hungry darkness
and stinger, fractal eyes, and I know
this loneliness is a paradox,
a paradox is that measurement
made when either of the particles
collapses the state of the entanglement
instantaneously, before any coffee can be made,
before any result could have been communicated,
faster than light. We are spinning.
The distance and timing cannot be chosen.
A letter arrives, and then another.
I miss you and yet, you and I are
the interval between the two measurements,
connecting the events, would have to travel 1,200 miles,
faster than light, I begin to wonder.
For two spacelike separated events x1 and x2 there are inertial frames
in which x1 is first and others in which x2 is first—
correlation between the two cannot be explained
as one measurement is determining the other:
different observers would disagree about the role of cause and effect.
Different observers like to disagree, loudly, at church picnics.
Entanglement is an area of extreme effects
demonstrated experimentally with small diamonds
worn on the left hand, with delicate reserve.
If a pair of particles are generated in such a way
that their total spin is known to be zero, and one particle
is found to have clockwise spin on a certain axis, the spin
of the other particle, measured on the same axis, will be found
to be counterclockwise, as to be expected, in June,
due to their entanglement.
It appears that one particle of an entangled pair knows
what measurement has been performed on the other,
which at the time of measurement may separate—
by arbitrarily large distances. This distance is not intentional.
This loneliness is a paradox. This blue rocking chair is a time machine.
We are rocking. We are spinning.
