Friday, June 23, 2006

Asymptotic Freedom in Quantum Chromodynamics

In particular, at low temperatures neither quarks
nor gluons can exist in isolation. This peculiarity
of QCD – that the basic entities of the theory cannot
be isolated – is called confinement. It is, as you
might imagine, one main reason the theory took
so long to find. -Frank Wilczek

Where are you when I am at fault’s edge,
walking a one-way avenue
as sun alloys a cast aluminum noon?

A couple at the pannier’s points me
to brown bread around cheddar, a slice of white onion
and wetter mustard mashed with horse radish.
Without question, grackles hassle hawk,
who has found an emerald owl’s nest
between firs on the road to Bend.

Odin Falls are posed this moment
of Mercury on the Libra/Scorpio border.
Moon smears a run uphill
to transit a high kitchen table,
measuring hedgerow by headstone
on a path cut across the lap of the tor:
I want that road in my dreams.

I’ll be both visiting and leaving,
consoling and grieving as faces rive.
I’d know if I were undertaking
or keeping ground for the dead.
I’d wait for the ice of age by doctors’ time –
forty, maybe fifty years, until blood and semen
soak the Oort, deep in Pluto’s wealth.

When darkness and light are finally both alike
and the livid blood reminds to let learning go –
whatever comforter covers and suffers
to muffle the melt dropping in steps:
this hot shower, this tea, this time
of any tenebrous break, seem final, too.

A point of swallow parts for scarlet hummingbird
as rain falls in lilac and falls
in the thorn field at the dell floor.
Coyote wakes me and I’m wanting
an alley through winter’s green.