Gravity’s End
Grief isn’t a particle.
I can’t take it apart and examine its insides.
I can’t send it through the Large Hadron Collider
and break it down to a boson.
But grief is a crude reductionist.
It comes in waves, finds my insides,
breaks me down – and everything falls apart.
They say distance lessens the ache, time heals,
but spacetime is curved, it draws us back
to each other, our atoms intertwined,
entangled on the quantum scale.
Grief is a cruel arbitrator between the grave
and the gravitas of this suffering.
They say energy cannot be created
or destroyed, it can only be transformed
Don’t I know it! I feel you here, even now
For what is separation if not an unbinding,
a force impinging another’s reluctance
to let go, pulling away only to return
again and again, like a persistent memory.
Maybe I need a seance not science
to connect the dots, reconnect what’s lost.
A woo-woo intervention, or a psychedelic shortcut.
Is there a loophole in the poles now apart?
Show me a wormhole out of this black hole.
Where do I rip the fabric of parallel universes
to emerge on the other side? The tear
that will end the tears, when the relativity
of this reality will make sense, when both sides
of this misaligned equation will finally resolve
and add up to something that doesn’t feel like
a subtraction, a lessening, a half-life.
If there is a rainbow at gravity’s end,
strap me to that accelerator
and hit send.
© Julian Matthews
Julian Matthews is mixed-race poet from Malaysia, published in Loch Raven Review, The American Journal of Poetry, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, and Borderless Journal, among others. He stumbled onto poetry by accident in 2017 at a writing workshop. That happy accident has turned into a rabid compulsion. He is still extricating himself from the crash.
If you wish to support his recovery, Paypal him at trinetizen@gmail.com or send Wordle answers via http://linktr.ee/julianmatthews
The Loch Raven Review 