July 2021
Bio Note: I am a writer and teacher who currently serves on the Alaska Writers Guild Board of Directors. In addition to Verse-Virtual, my work has recently been published in CIRQUE and 7x7. My illustrated collection of short fiction, The Birthday Picture: and Other Stories, will be published through Red Sweater Press this fall, with a virtual book launch happening on Tuesday, August 31. The following poem is written in the golden shovel form.
Chaos Theory
Tell me something I don’t know about the universe.
—Bob Hicock, “A Braid of Unknowing I Tie Before You”
“What if” is the true science of entropy,
the unpredictability of all that is
or could be; I wonder, if we actually
asked every question, had the patience
to hear every possible answer in
the span of our lifetimes, what disguise
could Truth don to hide from us, [and]
what troubled aspect of tangled love
could survive the war of knowing? Which is
worse, feeling everything at once, or the
absence of all feeling? I can only
imagine the internal dynamics, the way
a soul might battle itself with no means to
rationalize emotional decision, to explain
away a right or wrong. Perhaps this is why
we are not gods, but a collection of atoms,
patterned and sensitive, destined to cling
to irregularities governed by breath, to
contend with the ignorance of longing each
moment of our existence, bound to the Other.
©2021 Caitlin M. S. Buxbaum
Editor's Note: If this poem(s) moves you please consider writing to the author (email address above) to tell her or him. You might say what it is about the poem that moves you. Writing to the author is what builds the community at Verse Virtual.
It is very important. -JL