Thought Experiment
Aug 21
Written By Edward Nudelman
I never met Schrodinger's cat,
but I'm sure I would have liked him,
for his ability to thwart Dr. X,
his magic bag turning from escalator
to canoe, and finally to bouncing ball—
not to mention his talent for being
simultaneously alive and dead—
a free cat left to dawdle in a field
rife with mice, with no dogs in sight.
It embarrasses me to say, I once
confused Schrodinger's Cat
with Felix the Cat, whose names
both suggest obtuse importance.
To most, quantum mechanics
doesn't provide much more insight
than a surrealistic cartoon show,
though we admire pure mechanics
and game theory, the X's and O's
of power football, the impalpable
delineation of things indeterminate.
But my team either wins or loses,
light is either a wave or a particle,
Schrodinger's cat either dies,
or he never was in harm's way.
Bottom line, the apparent incongruity
of natural phenomena, in the face of eons,
compels us to at least consider the Cat.
Some bugs can remain dormant,
almost dead, for years, only to awaken
and suddenly multiply and flourish.
Even a blade of grass, heliotroping
toward the sun, astonishes—its last
dew-flecked particle subliming to air,
its supple stalk seemingly unbreakable.
There's no tackling the mystery of it,
no ascent to mountain or star,
without a humble cry of gratitude.
Like Schrodinger's cat in his box
lined with felt, at once vaporized
and materialized—we, too,
search for balance and certainty,
on this wild macroscopic blue planet.
Appears in “Thin Places.” Atlanta Review, 2019. Finalist, Atlanta Review Poetry Contest,
Inertia Violated
It is catalogued in the book of lies.
It is stated categorically in the introduction
and nuanced in experimental method.
You are an ageless battery.
You are a perpetual motion machine.
Yet the sky, the dirt, the galaxy
red shift away from you.
You are brine and bone, the quicksilver
of what you want but can never have.
You are firebrand and dancer.
A concoction of expanding energy.
Yet you are an unbalanced equation.
An inexorable flux, a dandelion
unhinged and vectoring in parabola.
Here I am and here you are.
We could be the wild siphoning night
extracting blue for its black swan sonata.
Or we could be the epiphany of sleep,
the soft tap dance of touching toes.
—from Rattle #49, Fall 2015
Following appear in “Thin Places”
Fell from the ceiling, or it rose
on the wind’s buoy, lifting you
weightless through gravity’s sea
to an unknown world free of pain—
whose unrelenting presence
drove you here.
Through an open window,
wars and truces,
a throng of crows protesting hoarsely
as if seeking redress for your grief,
a cattle drive across silver-lit sky,
in search of open pasture—
the world goes on,
with or without you.
If it weren’t for the tiny wisp
of sun-swept hair, exalted by its glow,
golden as storied harps or autumn
light delighting your gaze—
sleep would have overtaken you,
your last play for self-induced anesthesia.
In another shapeless sphere,
in past world’s spaceless time,
energy swirled and dissipated,
the vast, cool dust of stars condensing,
bending light for you, as if to bear
the weight of your heaviest thought.
-From Thin Places, forthcoming, Salmon Poetry, 2022
(featured in “Apple News,” via Poets and Artists Magazine)
Man in a Green Field
I am not my father’s elbow,
or the shadow of his hips—
but I have his round lips,
and penchant for pursing.
Career man though he was,
wrangling over annuities
and mutual funds, I often
found him wrestling
with the yard’s entropy,
waging an awkward war
against disorder in front
of our suburban home—
pushing back the tall grass
in our ditch with a sickle
and a can of gasoline.
I’d admire the fire
from a window—
though once I crept
closer, watching it burn
an arm’s length away.
His weekends were spent
crafting our scruffy grass—
power-mowing perfect
stripes, holding back
the tide of chaos with ardor.
He sold insurance,
but worked the yard
in earnest, like Sisyphus.
Absent Without Excuse
Child of paradox, shortstop, math wizard,
jokester, perennial existentialist—
I made it through Either Or
before the class had read Old Yeller.
At recess, I set out across town to disprove
Zeno’s paradox of infinitesimals,
and might have succeeded,
had it not been for the truant officer
who recognizing my curly hair,
marched me summarily back to school.
In detention, I ascended to seventh heaven
in an inkling, brazenly transfiguring
into Mickey Mantle on opening day.
But the detention officer, transported
to Yankee stadium as an umpire,
sent me home with a letter for my parents.
Taking the longer route, I got lost chasing
a bird and found myself in a meadow,
contemplating each green blade as though
the field had a secret only I could keep.
Forging New Paths
Waking early, as August sun sublimes dew,
spreading lighter air like a blanket
over creeping things, and those with wings,
hallowing their green halls of new grass—
what is it I expect from this morning,
whose fate is to move shadow into light?
When will the surprise of it wake me further,
into a realm jeweled with wisdom?
In this corridor, an interspecies kinship is forged—
spring worm and fly, gulls’ distant notes,
ever plaintive, a line of crows on the fence,
armored like guardians of a deeper truth.
My dog, in her last years, is unfazed by such magic.
She noses the gate open, plods to where she last
remembers her tennis ball, muzzle to ground.
Crows scatter as she advances, more like donkey
than dog, dignified by courage to the end,
kindred under the skin, and in the earth we’ll end in.