Dead Heisenberg
Could dead Heisenberg's
uncertain fylfooted ghost,
gaunt and luminous, forever
climbing now, descending now
the same old glowing bars,
the rows of stars
of near and far galaxies,
condemned to be someplace,
to be somewhere restrained,
could his shade still break the chains,
smash the rigid ruts,
the nuts and bolts
of unalterable order?
No cobwebby waves to contend with,
shaggy uncertain crests
lost in the depths
of uncertain histories,
ghostly mysteries;
no good fight against
orchestrated theories
and eminent authorities
scaring or scoring the universe
into static Newtonian order.
No need to unsteadily proceed
to some conclusion, some sum
of hidebound computations,
hard and fast calculations
chalked on a dusty blackboard;
the resolution is not there to be found
and Heisenberg knew it.
No matter where you go, said he,
zinging and slinging particles
or parts of digits
or quiddities of quarks,
bitten to the quick
by colossal forces,
zigging and zagging
somewhere, nowhere,
you are never only there;
every place is no place at all, 1
every oasis of certainty
dry as a bone,
barren as the moon,
searching, venturing
beyond worlds upon worlds
of time and place,
targeting the farthest wastes
with doubtful appearances.
Nevertheless and always
there is never any certain home,
never any place of rest,
never anything but uncertain restless pace.
A talented man, Heisenberg,
no doubt a genius,
an explorer in the realm of science
who at the wrong time
did protest just a little
and ended up in the frying pan;
a lucky chance in the black order,
pulled out by two mothers,
slapped on the wrist and
off he goes to an untidy
nuclear hesitation for the Reich,
a hesitation of uncertainly itself,
a form of action, of determination
and what about it? What do we know?
To this day we think we know
what we know is only his uncertainty;
a slow siege by the better angels
or the darker demons;
a slow siege leading to Gleichschaltung,
Heisenberg lock-stepping,
but somehow still out of step
and so it went and so he went.
Heisenberg works for this machine
grinding out equations
amidst the click of uncomprehending
Nazi boots and spurs;
his tiny cockle-burrs
merest particles winging on
to a new universal See,
a new unbounded race
to take us everywhere
and nowhere at once;
the looker looks
for no certainty, no set pattern
sees only gists and blurs;
does not believe his eyes,
cannot see the possibility
of the dust of centuries,
second by second,
rising up, getting out of hand,
getting away and getting in line
with the unsteady mazy dance
of heavenly angels of the new order,
of stars and atoms
tweaking out of orderly intent,
debasing solid design
with random mindful guile;
speeding on, breaking open
intangible time and tearing
the angels' symmetric wings
to feathery shreds;
they shed divine tears,
lost in a heaven of possibilities,
winking and blinking tears for nothing,
their lost wings still someplace
and someplace the whole shebang
speeds on, speeds on their wings
made whole again, speeds on
past Heisenberg in his classroom
teaching under the hooked cross
how things work outside the Reich.
We know what we know about him,
motioning to us in his wayward way,
is as uncertain as his motives,
skidding around as he does,
skipping fissioning stones
of neutrons
into glowing nuclei
with the skill of a busker
walking on stilts,
finding his certain way
through this unbelievable circus,
this unfocused universe
at sixes and sevens with itself;
a tapestry of deceit and
Heisenberg, steady as he goes
knows it and lived it.
In the Rearview Mirror
I can't, for the life of me,
explain the dry nettles and thistles
in a dead calm
clicking and ticking
against my Old Town canoe,
gone to rack and ruin
in my backyard;
its shell holding
a haphazard flowerbed
to no purpose.
It was a nice canoe once
and I was young
as springtime back then,
ready to go
with the rest of them
in a frenzy of beat-up
Fords and Chevies,
taking off for burger stands
I have known,
passing by dull enduring
suburban scenery,
the moon cranking up,
gigantic silver coin, looks
worn thin as parchment, relic
from some faraway
decayed Roman realm,
memories of its Caesars
enough to sustain its reign
over the centuries.
So the moon stands.
Betty and I
caress fingertips
on the way home;
awkward tender
in my parked car
we feel each other up,
late in the night
when the dark gets good;
yet our landscape
of pioneering time
grows small and brief
and commonplace;
our playground of now
and then blends to
one simple confined space.
Sitting up straight
as parishioners
in the front seat of my car
we enjoy our touching,
kissing, searching,
her naked nipples and
my straining member
point together at the distant
lifeless oblivious moon.
The dark is luscious, lascivious,
inviting as velvety fruit,
our bodies become familiar
as our hands and mouths explore
and I have no thoughts
of what's to come,
the years ahead, leading
to an old man and
his backyard Old Town canoe,
both pleasant and useless
as Never Never Land,
both assuming their place
inside and outside
what history can tell;
a past lost forever
in its sequence of elaboration,
its sequence of events,
possibilities come and gone,
but impossibly never
what was meant to be
in any stretch of mortal time,
any state of imagination or reality.
The boat, what's left of it,
no bird of passage, remains;
the boat holding its flowers.
No Tree
"No tree grows all the way to heaven,"
a darling end to a bible story
or Lenten play beginning
you might say;
a betrayal of trust
one way or another
in the power of God
to make anything beyond
what it is, whole, small or big,
seemingly nailed in place
and solid on the terrain.
"No tree grows all the way to heaven;"
Jung took off with this simple
everyman's bow to limitations
on human aspiration,
tagging this old saw
with his own Manichaean profundity.
"No tree grows all the way to heaven
unless its roots reach all the way to hell,"
which Jung borrowed, embroidered
and belted with layers of meaning,
turning a simple saying
to a metaphor of symmetry
to adorn, to address
the brutal best and worst in us,
a tree beyond Yggdrasil
with its wandering roots,
a tree rooted in the darkness of Hades
and blooming in the glades of heaven;
how sententious, how apt,
how symmetrical is that?
Is it well to strive upward?
Is it well to rive below?
Draw eternal damnation or bliss
down to the daily bread
of our lives, the sins of others,
the sins of us all,
seamy mud and blood,
skin of the teeth escapes
from mortal fall and disaster
or peeping from a cloud
of charity and grace,
turn the other cheek
for an infinite reward?
How many levels do we need?
How many stops on the way?
Dante's Commedia,
a trinitarian journey,
Goethe's Faust condenses
the same three realms;
heaven, man, earth,
the Dao's three-linked treasures.
Jung dreamt his house, went
through the portal of the dream,
landing on the top floor,
explores the rooms, the floors,
finding himself finally
opening that heavy door,
descending the cellar's stone stairs;
deep down he already knows
where and how it ends.
Down, down the stone stairs;
the cellar a vaulted room
ancient as Rome,
the floor stone slabs and
pulling a ring in a slab
open sesame and
narrow stone steps
leading down and
down he goes to a low cave
cut from the rock; layers of
dust, fragments of pottery,
wrecks of human skulls.
The dream ends there,
but we know what was below,
what was really
the dream's core
and so does he.
This final low cave holds
the roots of his tree,
the tree itself,
top to bottom,
in every sense in Jung's head,
a phantom, an ingenious fetch,
nothing more, nothing less;
the tree goes no deeper, no higher;
the tree goes nowhere.
We knew that before
and the rest of it as well;
the wages of sin,
the gages of lust and folly,
life, death, dust,
old empty rooms,
bones on the floor,
tenants long gone.
Let's get out of this,
this deathly place;
get out of here,
away from these worn images
of bounded levels,
petrified perished forms;
return above
to the simple holy air
of mother earth,
find those few lonely trees
we know are there;
those chosen trees
that grow and grow
from thin air, on their own,
rootless and unbound,
ascending like the angels
all the way to heaven.
No comments:
Post a Comment