ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Les Kay is the author of At Whatever Front (Sundress Publications, 2016), as well as the chapbooks The Bureau (Sundress Publications, 2015) and Badass (Lucky Bastard Press, 2015). He is also a co-author of the chapbook Heart Radicals (ELJ Publications, 2016; About Editions, 2018). His poetry has appeared widely in journals such as The Collagist, Redactions, South Dakota Review, Southern Humanities Review, Sugar House Review, Whiskey Island, and The White Review. He currently lives in Cincinnati with his wife, Michelle, and two small dogs.
If Certain Physicists Are Correct, There Are Infinite Universes, and We Must Assume That We Are Transcendently Happy in at Least One, and, Perhaps, Together
How much do you need from me,
how much do you want? Here
is my gall bladder, plump as a Rainier cherry
thickened with pesticide. Here
is my thumb, bitten to a nub so small,
strangers never see it to stop
when we wander rural highways
with nothing more than backpacks
and a plaintive piano melody.
In another universe, I finished my physics
degree, without thinking linear algebra
and its imagined matrices opaque as concrete.
In another universe, I finished my physics
degree and tackled two more, straining myopic
corneas to collate collider data, pausing,
only when herbal teatime arrived
beneath the German Alps, to remember reading
Don Juan or "Mont Blanc," and you
are walking the shore of some Scottish loch,
scanning the horizon for wild plesiosaurs
as you contemplate writing the next chapter
in your children's novel about a physicist,
(loosely based on me, though we have never met)
who travels between universes where
that which is inconceivable, except within
a few fringe imaginations, becomes real,
even the extinction of the majestic
Scottish plesiosaur.
In another universe, we are as anonymous
as the iris-green chipmunks camouflaged
in our meticulous gardens. We walk
our pet tarantula, Morris, around the cul-de-sac,
pausing beneath dandelion shade
to stroke each other's exterior hearts
with a pinky-first brush that seems more
natural than breathing or scratching lovingly
behind Morris's seventh eye. Here
is the universe where Stalin caught
the Spanish flu in November of 1917,
where Ayn Rand became a premier
Soviet abstract expressionist painter,
where Milton Friedman was laughed out
of Rutgers University and found his calling
as a solar station attendant outside Poughkeepsie.
Here is where we love each other
without constraint. Here is where no one
is hungry. Here, the physicists say,
is theoretically possible.
"If Certain Physicists Are Correct, There Are Infinite Universes, and We Must Assume That We Are Transcendently Happy in at Least One, and, Perhaps, Together" is one of those poems that began as part of something else. I don't want to say too much about that something else — a bleak collection, still in progress, about the Great Recession — or about the poem. Both can stand (or fall) on their own. I will, however, say that the manuscript is necessarily confessional and almost claustrophobic with regret. And, as a writer, I reached a point where I really needed an escape, a slightly cracked window that maybe the audience could help pry open. So maybe this is one way to do that — a mélange of the confessional, the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics, a touch of Ernst Bloch's utopian function, some deep reading into Edwin Rolfe's oeuvre, and a big ass spider. For me, it's a reminder that imagination is a force to be reckoned with — one that can be limiting, but most assuredly does not have to be.
Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
