It needed great scientific imagination to realize that it is not the charges nor the particles but the field in space between the charges and the particles that is essential for the description of physical phenomena.
~Albert Einstein in a textbook he wrote with a colleague.
In any case,
I can't remember much. Each day turns
into a memo, each memo
a found sound, a sounding.
What was 2/24/09?
Brushfire and fiddle,
maybe not the usual twaddle,
maybe not the usual pattern
we get so good at resounding.
Other things I don't remember:
. . . the lunch table
and its usual six-layer sandwich
of talking. J. to B. to
D. about C. The pure
algebra of it
where, masterfully, they insert X
when they don’t want to
say it, or better yet,
don’t know it. Time playing like
an old, slightly warped record
in the corner, or
a Blues singer
who holds up a harmonica,
then a guitar, then
an old time saw,
and finally says, the hell with it,
I'll just use the goddamn
voice
god gave me.
. . . teaching anyone
anything, I think
they taught me
again:
restraint, restraint,
how to guide them
in their fumbling,
how to look away
before the blush bruises
or the thing that cannot be taken back
is given too freely,
how to hardly forget
that the classroom
is a field
in the field mice sense
and the Einstein sense
and the one the children
play well in
and it gives permission
for any day
to be seen and not seized,
not blinded into memo.
To: All Faculty
Re: Time
let the days be misrememberd appropriately
like the day the Internet went down
and the lost arts of whistling
and pinochle
and the found arts of timekeeping
by analogy
rose, rose, rose
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2 comments:
This one comes from the "poems against aneurysm" series.
Since you're so interested in restraint, I'll hold back from tell you what I felt about this poem.
Which is too bad, since it contradicts what you had to say about it.
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