December 5: Cascade Experiment
By Alice Fulton
Because faith creates its verification
and reaching you will be no harder than believing
in a planet’s caul of plasma,
or interacting with a comet
in its perihelion passage, no harder
than considering what sparking of the vacuum, cosmological
impromptu flung me here, a paraphrase, perhaps,
for some denser, more difficult being,
a subsidiary instance, easier to grasp
than the span I foreshadow, of which I am a variable,
my stance is passional towards the universe and you.
Because faith in fact can help create those facts,
the way electrons exist only when they’re measured,
or shy people stand alone at parties,
attract no none, then go home and feel more shy,
I begin by supposing our attrition’s no quicker
than a star’s, that like electrons
vanishing on one side
of a will and appearing on the other
without leaving any holes or being
somewhere in between, the soul’s decoupling
is an oscillation so inward nothing outward
as the eye can see it.
the childhood catechisms all had heaven,
an excitation of mist,
grown, I thought a vacancy awaited me.
Now I find myself discarding and enlarging
both these views, an infidel of amplitude.
Because truths we don’t suspect have a hard time
making themselves felt, as when thirteen species
of whiptail lizards composed entirely of females
stay undiscovered due to bias
against such things existing,
we have to meet the universe halfway.
Nothing will unfold for us unless we move toward what
looks to us like nothing: faith is a cascade.
the sky’s high solid is anything
but, the sun going under hasn’t
budged, and if death divests the self
it’s the sole event in nature
that’s exactly what it seems.
Because believing a thing’s true
can bring about that truth,
and you might be the shy one, lizard or electron,
known only through advances
presuming your existence, let my glance be passional
toward the universe and you.