How much do we need to know?

The small is beset by uncertainty. 

They say, and that’s just physics, 
that we cannot possibly know 
at one time, both the position and 
the momentum of a particle. 

Or of a thought, I think, though 
that tangles in unsolvable ways. I am 
here, juggling verbs and cold anguish 
and I am there, following each morning 
down a new abyss of ugly conflict. 
At an unknowable velocity.

There is not enough love to smother 
every wound. A single day demands 
five stages of grief and four stages of 
anger. Or all nine parts of disbelief. 
The summer sky explodes with 
lightning in the late afternoon
as if it too can only take so much.

There is a strangeness in normalcy 
like it shouldn’t be and yet it 
should. How else will the days 
pass if we cannot play hopscotch 
when we pass a chalk grid on a 
side street, if we do not sing 
along with the radio, even if we have 
forgotten the lyrics, if we will not slow 
down the last forty pages, because 
a book must end, but not just yet. 

But what is heavy and knotted still
grows like an evening shadow. There 
isn’t enough routine, enough 
nostalgia, enough kindness to outpace 
the night. Though I wonder where 
the moon is, how fast it is going, if we 
need to know both. There is enough 
universe out there for even the 
moon to be just a quark. For even 
hopeless desperation to pass. 

X and Netflix are open on 
adjacent tabs. Behind them, a 
cursor blinks like a tiny
heart on a clean white sheet.

#Poetry

This poem came from reading ‘Six easy pieces’ by Richard Feynman. A big thank you to my brother for giving me this book and all the other science books on my shelf!