spring/summer 2006, no. 7


 

 

would fire be                                                                so

                                                                         gentle?

 

 


 


 

First it was a mad love of electrons. An electron sets on a journey and another electron comes in. When they get closer the attraction is magnetic, so one electron shakes off the photon and the other one absorbs the photon — gets a kick and moves in another direction. They never stay together — they know that nothing stays. The simultaneous histories wave and cross and this wave function makes them equal. The universe has every possible history. Some of those histories will contain people like us some of them not. Which history do we live on? Which history do we choose? Do those histories cross and join? Which plane is our love affair still on? Do we have a room with a table and one child or children maybe? Could we ever have children? If everything moves around us and becomes modified constantly by the speed then we never even meet our children. They never stay. So does mystery never stay. Or, it always remains mystery by never staying the mystery - modified in each capillary second. To think of a final resting place then is a contradiction of elementary logic. The motion of “now” occurs in a time shorter than the blink of an eye, since a second of time delineates a segment of space spread out like a 186,000 mile long caterpillar. Imagine you are Alice, as you move through this “caterpillar” at ever-increasing speed. Space contracts.  When you achieve the speed of light, the space outside of our frame of reference merges and becomes infinitely thin, almost occupying the same location simultaneously. At such speed, time and movement come to a halt. “There is no there, there.”  I never possessed you. You will be always and never now and there. I just imagined holding you for a moment, but really can you hold even that moment of imagination? Can you hold the water? I had to, though, I had to create the idea of you, for man has to possess something. I created the idea of you and pinned it on my wall. I created birds out of you. But even birds stay only as long as you feed them.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

                       

 

                        ........................................... Ewa Chrusciel

Ewa Chrusciel is a poet and translator currently completing her PhD in poetry and cognitive poetics at Illinois State University. She holds an MA from the Jagiellonian University, Krakow. In 2003, Studium published her first book of poetry in Polish entitled Furkot. Her poems and translations have been published in a variety of journals and anthologies in the United States, Poland, Hungary, and Italy, such as Studium, Zeszyty Literackie, Chicago Review, Lyric, Spoon River, ClanDestino , Il Giornale,and Przekladaniec. Other poems from her new collection, A Life, have been published in XCP: Cross Cultural Poetics: Streetnotes 2006, Pebble Lake Review, and are forthcoming in Mandorla and American Letters and Commentary.
 

 


  

Copyright © 2006   Entelechy: Mind & Culture. New Paltz, NY. All rights reserved.