Thought Experiment
The clock has lost all its numbers.
I wake inside an Einstein thought experiment,
where my bones defy gravity and get sucked
what some call “up.” I’ve only time to grab
from beside the bed where we’re sleeping
our copy of Rovelli’s ‘Reality Is Not What It Seems’
and your coat hanger with its knitted jacket
that smells of your underarms, my love.
Our fingertips part, and I can just hear your voice
as it’s ripped away, saying “Don’t forget the Uncertainty …”
We both hang on to the skein of wool unravelling
from the hanger, as I go up like a kite, wave goodbye
to the school where the deaf boy I taught
is still wondering how loud bacteria are.
I pan out till all the beautiful, dreaming heads
are like phosphenes fading behind my eyelids,
whoosh up through the ionosphere you studied.
Already I’m ageing faster than those down below,
and soon I’m outside the Goldilocks Zone,
which is always just a few missed beats away,
flying without hope of ground. There is no ground.
I hover for a while on the horizon of a supernova
where space-time contracts to the tiniest units.
Even though I’ve no longer eyes to see, it’s still
a makeshift carnival with its far off fairground lights,
as when I myself was a new blue star in the darkness,
seeing amongst the brilliance centaurs, a witch’s head
(“Yes, yes, but it’s just a gas cloud of hydrogen,” you say).
And I’m describing every bit of it to you,
hanging on to the woollen thread we both know
would have burned up in the solar winds,
wondering again as we wondered many times before
if we’re really just orders of atoms, and thinking whatever
how marvellous to have been born into all of this.
No doubt I could go on for ages, these words
a way of rehearsing for some unknown future,
of saying farewell my love, and to you too, reader.
John Barron’s poetry pamphlet The Nail Forge is with Tall Lighthouse. His writing has featured in Antiphon, The North, Poetry Salzburg Review, Pennine Platform and Dark Mountain.