Schrodinger’s Cat

Schrodinger’s Cat

Driving down from the mountains in a gum-laden haze

our cell phone applications didn’t connect,

and our granddaughter, wired so intimately into everything, was lost

without her social media, ready to return to the mainstream

and her study of mathematical inequalities.

In Newcastle we sought out an old café we once knew,

now under new management.

What we found was a disappointing wormhole from our past,

and our granddaughter suggested we buy meat pies in Frederickton.

But the hundred-gallon aquarium behind the main bar still swarmed

with tinsel barbs speeding through streams of endless bubbles,

while the giant sucker-mouthed bottom feeder, anchored to the glass,

slept in a separate universe; and we ordered Thai basil with chicken,

hoping that a lost friend might arrive through one of Time’s many trap doors.

Our granddaughter accepts as true the trendy notion

within quantum physics that all histories and futures are possible.

And if such infinite possibilities are indeed the case,

one wonders if all of our dreams will eventually come to pass?

You and I have learned never to expect closure with anything,

the twists and cul-de-sacs of our observed current state

given to perpetual invention as to what really might have been,

where those things presumed dead come slinking

like Schrodinger’s Cat into our brief and fragile present.

As a teenager she knows what forces attract each other,

and how the stars shape the endless cycles of desire.

The drive to the coast has left her woozy, for we live far off the beaten track,

and she yearns for rain just as we would recover the elapsed years.

Better to resist the impulse at this point to mention the notion of paradox,

or to ask her of how lives should be led,

for she is tired,

and there will be time enough for both pain and the uncertainty principle,

and for the wondering of where it all goes.

Dan Guenther