Quantum Elegy

1
He wore a black fur hat against snow
split by a few junipers, and he became a small i on the trail,
his pale face, at a distance, the small emptiness
between his body and the period suspended above it
as though gravity, to this professor of physics,
need not apply. As he walked up the hill,
as though decapitalized, something relegated
to marking pages from an introduction in his textbooks,
he seemed more italic, more a slant heading into something extraneous,
which is to say, the way I think of him now
is less than it should be, a vowel
shortened under a breath trailing cotton on cold days,
invisible on warm ones,
which is really a way of saying
light sometimes comes out as a particle,
and other times as a wave,
weighing. . . .

2
When my father married for the last time, an IV sack
was perched above his wheelchair, his hat in his lap.
His hair long by then, he was the imprint
in the old way, the Newtonian measure of equal and opposite
forgotten by a typist, who,
pressing a key, forced the metal arm against a page
gradually blackening. Sitting, my father’s body was a bold letter
next to a white gown, his bag
of blood suspended like a point that no longer
defied gravity, as though for a moment the typist
who would strike him there
thought more of the Carolina Wren poking under the hood of a car,
or a gull distancing itself at dusk,
or an apple hanging above the sleeping Newton,
a blurry speck on his spectacles, and the weight
at the end of the typewriter’s arm
didn’t quite hit the page with the attention it should.
The dot, supposed to hover above the body,
was not fully there. It’s as though the moment
in which his i came into being through pure classical
mechanics had lost its velocity, and my father,
holding his last wife’s hand, could simply watch himself
grow smaller above his head.

3
And what is honest, finally, about
what is at once there and not there,
versus what is either there or not,
is more like snow. It falls in small attractions
enough that to lick the flakes
makes more than the syllable i can,
no matter how long it tries to keep on my tongue.
It would violate the laws of one physics or another,
this praise my father performed by walking up a hill each morning,
or marrying three times, or opening a shoebox
with a hat in it blacker than lampcord,
blacker than the drain hole in a tub, blacker
than the heavy tissue of his bones that attracted,
according to his textbooks and radiation scans,
too much light. My father’s hat, a singularity on a hillside,
would be too dense, anyway,
for my hands which on a cold day, for a second,
wouldn’t know the difference between burning and freezing.
My father did not drag or limp up the hill
to work in the morning. He stopped and waved,
making a little variation on the letter i,
his face the blank force of chance
that is all the matter.