entanglement

watching the reflections of clouds passing across the skin of a small woodland pool . . . .

Entanglement

A librarian in Calcutta and an entomologist in Prague

sign their moon-faced illicit emails,

“ton entanglée.”

No one can explain it.

The strange charm between border collie and sheep,

leaf and wind, the two distant electrons.

There is, too, the matter of a horse race.

Each person shouts for his own horse louder,

confident in the rising din

past whip, past mud,

the horse will hear his own name in his own quickened ear.

Desire is different:

desire is the moment before the race is run.

Has an electron never refused

the invitation to change direction,

sent in no knowable envelope, with no knowable ring?

A story told often: after the lecture, the widow

insisting the universe rests on the back of a turtle.

And what, the physicist

asks, does the turtle rest on?

Very clever, young man, she replies, very clever,

but it’s turtles all the way down.

And so a woman in Beijing buys for her love,

who practices turtle geometry in Boston, a metal trinket

from a night-market street stall.

On the back of a turtle, at rest on its shell,

a turtle.

Inside that green-painted shell, another, still smaller.

This continues for many turtles,

until finally, too small to see

or to lift up by its curious, preacherly head

a single un-green electron

waits the width of a world for some weightless message

sent into the din of existence for it alone.

Murmur of all that is claspable, clabberable, clamberable,

against all that is not:

You are there. I am here. I remember.

Jane Hirshfield, 1953