Poetry
Cadnum, Michael & Hodor, Timothy
I read it once, stopped, and read it again. The words literally danced on the page. I read it a third time, out loud alone in my room. I heard a voice that was not my own. In a way that I did not...
...I have learned that nature Plays dead in the winter...
...This year, I play the same game: I see a woman rising from the point of evaporation And breaking free from the knot of sounds, And I wonder when I should abort my dormant death...
...The forms are not essential...
...In a way that I did not understand and could never explain, the words spoke to the heart...
...13 September 1991:509 POEMS Michael Cadnum Blackberries Ants stream to the berrries, berries pricked with hairs like anty legs...
...I was miles away, thinking about last night's experience and concluding that it was the stuff of dreams...
...Birds begin their departure And seek another sun...
...A sift of sand stretches and lets go...
...Mainly I learned that the rabbi had it right the first evening...
...If you try to isolate the particle nature of light, if you seek solely to verify your own experience, you will lose the wave behavior...
...When they are gone, the meat-sweat on the saucer is stroked by a jewel, a wasp from the eaves kissing the dish...
...I learned a lot in "Psychology and Jewish Spirituality...
...If you are a Christian, your Messiah has come...
...Fall in, says the body...
...As a final piece, let's turn to page 228...
...f I Timothy Hodor The Lazarus Love Before the eyes of autumn, Another summer has evaporated into itself...
...Light and matter behave sometimes like wave and some- times like a particle...
...Boards shrink around square nails...
...There is one who sings the song of his own life," I heard myself begin...
...They are sounds of joy and gladness, sounds of jubilation and celebration, sounds of ecstasy and holiness...
...It is part of our relationships, our psychology, our science...
...and an easy laugh...
...Herding the red lizards of his fine...
...I have nowhere to go And no reason to move...
...Thinking no one knows...
...Eighty-five years ago the scientific worldview was changed when Einstein published a paper entitled "On a Heuristic View of the Nature of Light...
...Would Rabbi Kook be offended if I suggested that the one who rises with all these things is God alone...
...What is lacking in our belief that compels us to try and force it upon others...
...Both...
...What is instructive about the scientific analogy, for those who stand in awe of the diversity of the world's religious traditions, is that the reality is greater than our ability to experience it...
...And so with God...
...The dark around every single word we will ever say...
...are true, depending on where you stand...
...Holding our breath, everything we have done is pointless...
...Only God...
...Birds squall in the shadows...
...They are both--and neither...
...Spilled gravel whispers from side to side, and ticks the bottom...
...I study the leaves, The bark, and the branches...
...Coincidence...
...Later we had a small farewell party, each one having brought something to share...
...If you are a Jew, God is in the waiting...
...In it, he suggested that light, which displayed itself daily in the wave-like properties of reflection, refraction, and diffraction (images in the mirror and rainbows in the sky) also had particle nature...
...Truth" depends on where you stand...
...I was unable to par- ticipate in the discussion that followed...
...Drought Morning, the rake handle palmed gray, the lemon scent brightens the air, leaves and brown rind raked into a pile...
...Evening, the feral cats pause at the saucer of chicken meat...
...For this work, Einstein received his Nobel Prize...
...Nancy, would you read please...
...If the physical creation has this paradox built into its very core, does it reflect its creator...
...We know how he waits with his hose, his rake, thinking: it will be all right...
...Mysticism in dreams can be dismissed...
...It leaves us to our silence, a bounty we cannot gather, a feast armored by itself, as vast and tangled as the days we will not live, foundations broken and scattered under vines like the skeleton of fire...
...Sun slips through the gaps, laying yellow strips veined like meat in the dark...
...A single black plant of barbed wire, and a slide of rocks hard as pennies...
...It has taken its warmth To a soul we know by time...
...Then there is one who rises with all these songs in one ensemble, and they all join their voices...
...The nature they display to you at any time depends in part on where you stand, on experiments you chose to perform...
...Richard Feynman, another Nobel-Prize-winning physicist, wrote, "When we look for a certain phenomenon we cannot but help disturb it in a certain minimum way, and the disturbance is nec- essary for the consistency of the viewpoint...
...Does every religious tradition, every community, every individual have its vital piece of the whole...
...Had he known...
...And our neighbor down the road begins to break the law: he burns his weeds, his secret fire touching us with its black breath...
...Together they sing their songs with beauty, each one lends vitality and life to the other...
...Even the Christian God has a triune nature...
...The larger truth, encompassing both, is God...
...They are sounds of joy and gladness, sounds of jubilation and cele- bration, sounds of ecstasy and holiness...
...The energy is quantized in packets called photons...
...A kind of eternity the bee trembles upon, a kind that claws the skin...
...What is it then in the nature of religion that has allowed us over the years of history to divide ouselves by grasping at our little piece of the truth...
...light and matter have both wave and particle nature...
...The skeptic, the doubter, the consigner of mysticism to the realm of intellectual curiosity was having a mystical expe- rience with Rav Kook...
...Then in 1927, in another Nobel-Prize-winning piece of work, Davisson and Germer found that matter too--elec- trons, protons, and ultimately you and I--also has a wave/particle duality...
...We read a lengthy section from The Lights of Penitence and talked about the ideas...
...the rabbi's voice filtered through my daze and I turned mechanically to the appropriate page...
...I must go on And part from The sunken echoes of months That have woven memories across my mind...
...Soon experiments were being interpreted in view of this new model, and things which had previously been mysterious became clear...
...I had come empty-handed, afraid that I would unwittingly break one of the food laws and embarrass myself or my new friends...
...This creekbed is a place we cannot travel, red-black with living barbed wire...
...As always, we read aloud, moving around the room at random, covering the final passages that the rabbi wanted to share...
...Burn "coyote," until he runs, invisible behind the wisteria, past the tractor roped by dried morning glory to earth...
...only by accepting the "truth" from many angles is the larger truth revealed...
...Mysticism in waking moments could change your life...
...The sunken cellar of the burned house swells with living chains, spiked and flourishing...
...e met for the final class the next evening...
...A man with a yellow setter...
...518: Commonweal...
...Why me...
...The Messiah has come and the Messiah has not come...
...Our minds have left and right brains...
...We talk into dark, crickets everywhere, and when we hear something drinking from the fishpond you mouth Mine Shaft The road here scrawls, erased, wash-slashed, finally not-road...
...Similarly, to allow the wave behavior to appear, you must let go of the particle picture...
...We deal all the time in paradox and duality...
...So far, says the body...
Vol. 118 • September 1991 • No. 15
