Strange things happen, unexpected things, here at my house. It’s in a quiet woods, a small stream running just behind. We live with turkeys, squirrels, and deer, and the more elusive coyote and fox. Day and night, they amble or scurry by, just off the patio. Decades ago, I left my first teaching job, got married, joined my husband here. I’ve lived by the mantra that things work out. I’d been an assistant professor and had a decision to make: stay, and go where the job would lead me? or leave for love? I chose love. And yes, I eventually began teaching again. Now retired, and lately feeling the need to challenge my aging brain cells, I’ve been ending my days bundled up in bed, reading about quantum physics. That brings me to my late friend Ralph, who is strangely wrapped up in this story. An aging bachelor, his office was next to mine at that first job. It, oddly, brings me, too, to Schrödinger’s cat, the hypothetical cat in a hypothetical box, who is dead or alive when the box is opened—one theory being that its fate is determined, somehow, by being observed. Don’t worry. The heart of this story is not physics.
My friendship with Ralph was a lasting one. He would, without fail, play recordings of the music of Enya in the late hours of the afternoon, and then appear at my office door, swaying to the music. Even after I left that position, we stayed in touch. The phone would ring. I’d pick up and hear the tinkling of ice cubes in a martini, and then Ralph’s breathy voice would regale me with some new tidbit of happenings on campus. Occasionally, my husband, Bruce, and I would drive over and pick him up, then we’d head to dinner and a casino.
Ralph was a rare spirit. He and Bruce would play blackjack, while I hung around and watched. After a few such outings, Ralph sincerely believed, at least he said he did, that I carry bad luck in the realm of games of chance. Apparently, luck would desert him if I was standing there. He would order me to go off somewhere else and take my bad luck with me. I would laugh and wander off into a room of slots. Was I a carrier of bad luck? Ralph was teasing me, which he loved to do. But I suppose it created a little reality, at least in that time and place. I knew Ralph. I knew it was a sort of love between us.
What had gotten me that first job was that I’d studied to be a poet. After I left and had relinquished the office next to Ralph, and those afternoons of Enya, I began to dabble in prose—fictional stories and essays. On one of our trips to see Ralph, he said to me, meant I’m sure as an innocent observation, “Well, you’re not a poet anymore.” The words, the idea, stung. “Of course I am,” I said. That was a reality I wouldn’t embrace.
When Ralph passed, I drove over to attend his memorial service. His death left a hole, the loss softened a bit by the sudden presence of dragonflies. They began appearing whenever we were outside, flying around us, so curious and affectionate, we started wondering if they were a manifestation of Ralph. It’s been many years since, and I’ll still glance at the phone sometimes, thinking it might ring, and I’d answer, and hear that tinkling of ice. From another universe, perhaps.
So here I am, these many years later, wondering about reality and universes, and reading about theoretical physics. I’ve come to claim kinship with physicists, who have eyes for what’s hidden. Poets love what’s hidden, too. My head has nodded suddenly, there in my bed, not from approaching sleep but in recognition. First, on the night I read that “the present” doesn’t exist. Of course. My present in this little house is not your present, wherever you are. Physicists contend that the world isn’t what we think it is. It’s change—events happen, events interact. To quote the writer Carlo Rovelli directly, from his book The Order of Time:
“Nothing is: things happen.”
I’m on board with it. Something happened here lately, at our house—something that sent me into a deep dive of introspection. After a few days, I picked up a pen, expecting to write an essay about it. But when my hand began to move, what emerged was poetry. I’ll end here with that poem. I still live by the mantra that things work out. Whatever world Ralph is in now, I hope the poem is the same there, and that he can see it. I would like for my loved friend to see that it’s still poetry that moves in me.
Schrödinger’s Cat
This morning, again, the gray squirrel
seems to be waiting.
He spies us, the dog and me, then jumps
and clings to the trunk of a particular
oak tree. His tail, a soft and full plume,
jerks and waves as he locks eyes
with the dog—again, the staring contest
between them, until he scrambles up the tree
and leaps through the web of branches
to the next tree, then the next,
clearly thinking stupid dog.
I’m standing there, thinking—
I mean, what else is there to do, waiting,
again, for a dog to do her business?
I’m standing there thinking about Schrödinger’s
cat, the famous cat in an imaginary
quantum box.
Open the box—you find the cat alive.
Open it again, the cat is dead. Some say
it’s dead and alive in the box, at the same time,
that an observer’s looking at it calls
the question, seals its fate. My imperfect knowledge
of physics tells me maybe a person shouldn’t
even look into the box, wouldn’t want the cat
dead, no use courting guilt.
If that’s not strange enough,
those who are quantumly in-the-know
are saying there are multiple universes,
and I’m in them. There are different universes
with some version of me in them,
doing things that are different from what
I spend my days on now. Who am I
to argue, I enter a different universe every time
I dream a new story onto its page—
echoes, I sometimes think, of hidden,
mysterious places I’ve been to
in my sleep . . .
This morning, the gray squirrel was waiting.
This evening, we discovered a tragedy.
The squirrel that pranks the dog
has died, that squirrel I didn’t know I loved.
We found him disemboweled, almost
flat on the rock bed that borders the house.
Something, something wild,
had opened the squirrel’s version
of Schrödinger’s box, and it was dead.
Teeth or talons or a fierce beak had
torn away what he was, but his tail, that tail,
fanned out on the ground as if alive.
Since we moved him to the woods,
the only service we could provide, I haven’t
stopped thinking about him.
I wish I could have hidden him in the eaves,
chattering and safe, the way my grandpa used to hide
cash in the eaves of his house. But I couldn’t.
So I think, again, of Schrödinger, and damn it anyway,
I decide to open the squirrel’s quantum box.
Morning? Evening? Death? Life?
I risk it, and there he is—alive and staring down
the dog, then that familiar leap, his tail
a benediction flashing through the canopy
of a hidden, shimmering universe.
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