Poetry: “Quarks,” by Jim Krosschell

For GFL

A poet I know lives on Noyes Street.
Not Dogma Drive
where what we see
is what we get,
but a neighborhood of wavicles, oscillations, uncertainties,
where houses only tend to exist,
where a hockey puck rippling a back-yard net
only tends to occur….
So, solid things might not be.
Guts and wheelbarrows
comprise quarks colliding and bosons spinning,
un-pin-down-able.
It’s not a contradiction,
that home both entangles and frees,
that courage cannot exist without fear,
that grief is a torso muscled in emptiness.
These are polarities,
electric,
the ends of an oval,
and we are sparks fleetingly etched
in an orbit often too beautiful
for words.

Jim Krosschell’s poems and essays have appeared in some 70 journals, and he has published two essay collections: One Man’s Maine, which won a Maine Literary Award, and Owls Head Revisited. He lives in Northport, ME and Newton, MA, and is board president of the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance.