"Quantum Foam" by Elizabeth Jacobson

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend Support Poem-a-Day November 8, 2019   Quantum Foam   Elizabeth Jacobson

The air is close by the sea and the glow from the pink moon drapes low over a tamarind tree. We hold hands, walk across a road rushing with traffic  to an abandoned building site on the bay, look out across       the dark marina. Sea cows sleep by the side of a splintered dock, a cluster of them  under the shallow water, their wide backs covered in algae like mounds of bleached coral. Every few minutes one floats up for air,  then drifts back down to the bottom,  without fully waking.   They will do this for hours, and for a while we try to match  our breath to theirs, and with each other's. In the morning, sitting in the garden beneath thatch palms,  we drink black coffee from white ceramic cups. Lizards killed by feral cats are scattered on the footpath. I sweep them into a pile with the ones from the night before.    Waves of heat rise from the asphalt,  and we sense a transparent gray fuzz lightly covering everything  as if there were no such thing as empty space,  that even a jar void of substance holds emptiness as if it were full.            Copyright © 2019 by Elizabeth Jacobson. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on November 8, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets. About this Poem   "A few years ago, I was in Miami Beach and very lucky to chance upon this group of sea cows. A sea cow is such a luminous and mysterious creature—the rare times I've seen one I've felt the presence of greatness. Subsequently, I read about quantum foam. What I understood was that empty space is tremendously busy with a fuzzy, bubbly substance which fills the area between everything like connective tissue, making nothing separate. The quantum foam concept predicts nothing is really something—that everything one presumes as empty is really overflowing with fullness." —Elizabeth Jacobson   Elizabeth Jacobson is the author of Not into the Blossoms and Not into the Air (Free Verse Editions/Parlor Press, 2019) which won the New Measure Poetry Prize. She is the Reviews Editor for Terrain.org and Poet Laureate of Santa Fe, New Mexico. Poetry by Jacobson   Not into the Blossoms and Not into the Air (Free Verse Editions/Parlor Press, 2019) "If the ocean had a mouth" by Marie-Elizabeth Mali "Daedalus, After Icarus" by Saeed Jones "Radial Scent" by Sharon Wang November Guest Editor: Sherwin Bitsui   Thanks to Sherwin Bitsui, author of Dissolve (Copper Canyon Press, 2018), who curated Poem-a-Day for this month's weekdays. Read a Q&A with Bitsui about his curatorial approach this month and find out more about our guest editors for the year.  A culture break, a source of daily renewal...   If reading Poem-a-Day has become a meaningful part of your day, please consider supporting this free series with a donation. Your gift makes publishing Poem-a-Day possible. Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit poets.org   Unsubscribe here.   © Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038

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