Little Things Can Mean So Much

~Wayne Clifford

 

The LHC must be a form of love,

some EEG of God’s synaptic pulse,

a whirligig, that our invention prove

the Other under matter where the Else

allows we are at all. Professor Higgs

was curious one morning where the mass

of quarks and leptons came from, so that big’s

inertial lump clump from each ertial ass

those newly baby bits of bangage mooned

at the Great Nothing. Higgs conceived a field,

by which creating, while he afternooned,

the weightiness of cosmos unconcealed.

 

Such heavy thought bore all he had invested.

Each sign was mete. Higgs, the evening, rested.

 

*

 

A-stunk of ozone, concrete damp, and cold,

I figure, smells and feels that darkened place

where, in the clicks and thumps of curving space,

a hum’s as deep a word as God has told.

 

And if I wonder at a space-time fold

approaching speed of light, streams of grace

colliding face to face and so embrace

what ordinary particles withhold,

I might just fear what I can’t know of stuff

and prophesy “Black hole!”, or “Fatal burst

of neutron radiation!” or, yes!, enough

of taxpayers’ cash to make things worse.

 

Oh, don’t be silly. Higgs wished not offend

the godly, nor give the world so sudden end.

 

*

 

From darkest matter, what we best might learn

is God Herself most likely’d not dis CERN

(though CERN, God bless’em, got it wrong with Higgs,

and thought his thought a flying of the pigs,

ennuaged[1] in an if (they didn’t take

his paper (God smiled at that mistake))).

 

Around, around, by a magnetic pull

of more raw juice than villages might use

on darkest nights when wolf might howl its call

in darkest woods between, and heart refuse

to think the demon any sort of man

the villagers call God, though no heart

admit the sacrilege,

 

to stalk God’s plan,

the magnets rend the mysteries apart.

 

*

 

The wolf waits in the ’cello at A#.

I’m not so good a player that the G

gets stopped that high that often. Since it’s me

the wolf awaits, my bow pressure that’ll warp

such stuttering vibration, oh, how I harp

on ’cello imperfections. But better be

a poor player than never get to see

that G string flutter, hear that warbled yawp!

 

I try to note in that unmusic all

the lengths of strings that bring the forces knit

as atoms.

As Pythagoras might have done.

 

And times I sit just to sound that caul

of oscillation, since such compose this git.

 

That by it, far and other, I’m unalone.

 

*

 

I think that God must be a word (for some

so abstract as to be unspelled); belief’s

a self-hypnosis come from staring dumb

at this so filled and empty world deceives

in being almost here. O leptons, sing!

 

The long of all that is and spanned can be

equivocates along each tensioned string

that fixed at this end plays a speck of me,

and at the other?

What entanglement

has twinned me to this question, this desire?

 

If going ’round in circles with our toys

reduces God to just a biggest noise,

we untranslate the spells to what is meant,

not what was spoken. O very hadrons, choir!

 

Just what is this ennuaging business? Find out in Quarc.

Wayne Clifford’s atomic components were once used by Marcus Aurelius, Yikin Chan Kawiil, Vlad Tepes and Pocahontas.

 

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