Author: Christine Gosnay

Christine Gosnay’s first book, “Even Years” (Kent State University Press, 2017), won the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared recently in Best American Poetry 2020, Poetry, Image Journal, AGNI, The Missouri Review, The Poetry Review, Ecotone, and Bennington Review, and has featured on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily. Her chapbook, “The Wanderer,” is the 2019 title in Beloit Poetry Journal’s Chad Walsh Chapbook series. She lives in the Santa Cruz Mountains in California. Her website is thewritechristine.com.

The Double Slit Experiment

 

 

I

Mr. Richard Feynman describes the double slit experiment.
Just relax and enjoy,
I’m going to tell you what nature behaves like

and if you will simply admit
that maybe she does behave like this,
you’ll find her a delightful, entrancing thing.

 

II

Asleep inside the word for water,
the unglossy leaf goes on its golden journey with the sunlight.

It is a magnificent seat in the river’s magnificent seat.
In many ways, we don’t use pressure to express time.

Here, or here, in a profligate patch, picture what is wildly going,
growing mild, bolting outside a dark schoolhouse.

Or here, silt catch-place making slit catch-place by the river
with small hearts-obcordates, with even smaller cuneates.

 

III

When the mock white circle
appears at the back of your tongue,

I wait to be correct. Limitless address.
I practice this in many men.

The window fills with juice-colored light.
The attractive neighbor backs up a car
on his way to eternity. In this my room,

from lustrous buildings’ distant sunset sheen, I learn
I will not be the one to find the world’s smallest things.

White paper boats fill my street.
I spend an hour in silence shining my reflection
into the black center in the word glass.

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