Gerber Dan - Particles: New and Selected Poems

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We hope you enjoy these poems. This e-book edition was created through a special grant provided by the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation. Copper Canyon Press would like to thank Constellation Digital Services for their partnership in making this e-book possible.To Deb, alwaysAnd, in memoriam, toJim Harrison Kobun Chino, Sensei Bob WatkinsandBarry Spacks

Table of Contents Particles The reason you do not clearly understandthe time-beingis that you think of time only as passing. DGEN, AD 1240 We must endure our thoughts all night, untilThe bright obvious stands motionless in cold. WALLACE STEVENS, 1946 Winter solstice the sun stopped for a moment can you feel its light stretching as it shrugs off its migration and turns back north toward the pole? On this rock, just the right distance from the nearest star, sheltered by Jupiter and kept in season by the steadying moon, being moves through my body like clouds, arriving in one shape, drifting off as another. I dont remember being born, only the great dog whose fur I clung to before the first day of school. Memory accounts for space, not time. It records the quality and angle of light, the keen, metallic scent of wind through porch screens the wailing as it rises the warmth and texture of air the weather and sometimes whether or not it was a Tuesday, but never how long it lasted or how many years ago only how it felt alone in that moment. And the sound of waves breaking.

We see time past as Euclidian moments of solitude with no date affixed long afternoons of childhood in no time at all, when it first occurred that you were seven, without knowing that, because of the moment now in memory you will always be seven in that place. Our solitude being alone with the one you knew there our loneliness being there without him. Two billion seconds of life now, on a planet only four and a half billion years old and every atom on loan to it much older than that. In the beginning, all that was was too hot for atoms too tightly packed to let go of its light as if the universe had come out the other side of a black hole heading back to where it began over ungraspable distance right now and not at all far from home. Every creation story I know comes out of the dark the brune garden in which light blooms. The master equation of the Standard Model of particle physics accounts for everything except gravity and gravity accounts for everything irresistible center of the spheres and stars, on and among which we go on curving our straight course as it draws the low-gliding hawk irresistibly back together with its shadow. The master equation of the Standard Model of particle physics accounts for everything except gravity and gravity accounts for everything irresistible center of the spheres and stars, on and among which we go on curving our straight course as it draws the low-gliding hawk irresistibly back together with its shadow.

Imagine Earth as the nucleus of a hydrogen atom from which were looking out hoping for a glimpse of the single electron whirling around in its orbit and like Neptune simply too distant to see a green pea in a green field a half-mile away. Now in confusion now in a wave a thousand blackbirds rise and veer above a stubble field their wings like obsidian in the sun. Illusory solidity of the world and things the chair Im on its atoms whizzing in arcs, repelling each other while I sit musing in this electromagnetic storm a chair. So much space inside an atom, why cant I reach through this wall? Is a honeybee one being, or an element of one being? Particles shadows of waves in water moving over bright sand. As a child I witnessed a tiny sort of particle accelerator in the cold, blue light of The Lone Ranger on black-and-white TV a beam of electrons through a cathode tube splayed out by a magnet to become Tonto and Silver crossing a phosphorescent screen. Every particle in their bodies represents the distillation of 100 billion bits from the big bang that immolated themselves to become light.

Now even quantum theory agrees, Form Is Emptiness mostly. In the glittering domain of the Summer Triangle buoyed up by crickets and frogs Vega drags her rhomboid harp through an isthmus in the Milky Way. We need our quietest hours to hear Earth turning night into day to feel it gather its waters against the pull of the moon hydrogen holding the waters together, and we made mostly of water hydrogen molecules drawn to each other wrapping up a bit of breathable air in their hydraulic embrace holding me together, and you, with a little oxygen drawn in. How is it that an atom of hydrogen the primary substance of all we know can be said to weigh less than the sum of its parts, and does that mean the total mass of the known universe mostly hydrogen would weigh less if we could weigh it all together at once? Matter appears to be jealous of light every particle mad to escape its mass to be just the light by which we see our world without self without the distractions of a you and me, apparently eternal like an electron to have no substance in which to decay. The mysterious shore across the great void a scary place from all youve heard, all youve imagined never quite clearly in view, and no one you know has been there. And how will you endure your thoughts in the great dark absence of everything youve known? Like the terminals of the battery in a lamp, matter and antimatter cancel each other out to become light.