Thought Experiment

Aug 21

Written By Edward Nudelman

I never met Schrodinger's cat,
but I'm sure I would have liked him,
for his ability to thwart Dr. X,
his magic bag turning from escalator
to canoe, and finally to bouncing ball—
not to mention his talent for being
simultaneously alive and dead—
a free cat left to dawdle in a field
rife with mice, with no dogs in sight.
It embarrasses me to say, I once
confused Schrodinger's Cat
with Felix the Cat, whose names
both suggest obtuse importance.
To most, quantum mechanics
doesn't provide much more insight
than a surrealistic cartoon show,
though we admire pure mechanics
and game theory, the X's and O's
of power football, the impalpable
delineation of things indeterminate.
But my team either wins or loses,
light is either a wave or a particle,
Schrodinger's cat either dies,
or he never was in harm's way.
Bottom line, the apparent incongruity
of natural phenomena, in the face of eons,
compels us to at least consider the Cat.
Some bugs can remain dormant,
almost dead, for years, only to awaken
and suddenly multiply and flourish.
Even a blade of grass, heliotroping
toward the sun, astonishes—its last
dew-flecked particle subliming to air,
its supple stalk seemingly unbreakable.
There's no tackling the mystery of it,
no ascent to mountain or star,
without a humble cry of gratitude.
Like Schrodinger's cat in his box
lined with felt, at once vaporized
and materialized—we, too,
search for balance and certainty,
on this wild macroscopic blue planet.

Appears in “Thin Places.” Atlanta Review, 2019. Finalist, Atlanta Review Poetry Contest,