The Physicist

from Star Sequence

Retooled this a bit after all of your comments. Hopefully it is a bit more readable now. Thanks!

I.

While looking
into the ambiguous
figures of a cipher
he cannot quite solve,
one day the physicist
may discover an answer,
a reality beyond
the present one.
While taking the true
measure of the collected
digits, the sum weight
of the variables,
he may find
an inequality
between the fractions
and the whole.


II.

While attempting to prove
the existence one night
of some exotic particle,
he may discover
as he gazes
into the private life
of a black hole
or neutron star
the darkest secret
of our race
is the illusory
nature of reality.


III.

He could go on dreaming
with those who fabricate the precise
measures of science.
Those who say history
began in a blink
from a single particle,
less than a nothing,
and from nothing
came all that we are
and all that ever was.

Or turn away
from certainty
the solid earth beneath
and follow another
ethereal path with those
who dream
the blistering
litanies of religion,
who cling to an equally
solid Almighty
who took seven days
to do as much.


IV.

What if
he still sees
the flaws
in their communal
dream, the crack
in the cosmic mirror?

Perhaps he will
turn to the wild
places and hear
the heartbeat of stones,
the dry thirst of rivers,
the improbable flight
of the humming bird
and cease waiting
for reasons
to appear for all
that is or ever was.

Perhaps he will
find peace
and a new dream
of the universe,
one that does not
require a handful
of numbers and dust
to support
the unreasonable
twirl of galaxies
around a theoretical
event horizon,
black hole of the soul.

Possibly a penchant
for daydreaming
has caused this fault, this lack
of lucidity that some would call
insanity. Maybe too much time
lost in tracing the fractures
of granite or collecting one too many
fossil vertebrae, preserved in silica,
too many nights stargazing rather than
learning to work arcane equations properly,
too much history of failing to follow order
until human reason fails
to inform his mind as it does others.

As the clouds of a nebula
explode into the new life
of a star, he may see
the super reality
of physics, the fantasia waltz
that weaves the fabric of everything–
this dream of life, thick as basalt
but infinitely more brittle–
this child of the ocean will hear
what the thunder says
and know an answer.