Alone in the Age of Quantum Uncertainty by Dick Westheimer

Alone in the Age of Quantum Uncertainty

         all verbs out-heaven death
                  —Katy Didden

It is such a tenderness
this disassembling.

I’d come here
intent on dying

but was shown what it’s like
for believers

when their gods call to them
through the gloom.

I had despaired with my children
about the future,

about hope, about their own children—
as the arc of the moral universe

bends backwards under the weight
of monstrous stones.

Thus, here I am, alone, ready
to be crushed—when I am undone

and then put back together
by the wind and dunes and shore,

told again that there is no better world
than this and no worse,

that the ocean waves are never finished
with their work and that the sky

repaints itself in shades of black and gray
and this improbable blue

every minute of every hour
of every unlikely day.

*

Dick Westheimer lives in rural southwest Ohio with his wife and writing companion, Debbie. He is winner of the 2023 Joy Harjo Poetry Prize and a Rattle Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in ONLY POEMS, Whale Road Review, Rattle, Abandon Journal, ONE ART and Vox Populi. His chapbook, A Sword in Both Hands, Poems Responding to Russia’s War on Ukraine, was published by Sheila-Na-Gig.
More at www.dickwestheimer.com