Ellen Bass

Nonlocality

The Scientific American says a particle
can affect a particle somewhere else
without touching it
or touching something that touches it.
Not urging current through wire
or waves of sound through the vibrating air.
Not even luring it with gravity,
curving the time-space continuum–
another thing I can’t say I understand,
even with the illustration
of a bowling ball stretching a trampoline.
But on this unusually warm day in April
in Rowe, Massachusetts with so many birds arriving,
whistling their repertoires,
a balmy wind shushing through the pines,
the beeches and maples barely budded,
all that damp green still packed in,
I think I should be hopeful. Haven’t the saints
always told us we’re one?
Yet I can’t help feeling uneasy.
Someone could be sticking pins into a voodoo doll
that has my gray curly hair and bad knee
causing a tree to topple over on my head.
Maybe this very one I’m sitting under
as I write down my thoughts in its shade.
Or I could be hurting someone else.
Just flying across the country
I’ve made a carbon footprint the size of Godzilla.
And then my t-shirt was probably sewn
by a child who never sees the sun
and my wedding ring cost the life
of a miner in Africa. And though
my plastic water bottle says it has an “eco-shape”
designed with 30% less plastic
and though I didn’t buy it myself and only
use it because my student left it behind
and I washed off her red lipstick print,
I’m not sure the polar bear is going to bother
with such distinctions and may swat the rising water
with his tufted paw where the ice has broken
under his weight again
and I’ll have an instant heart attack
right here in the picturesque New England countryside.
But the thing I’m really starting to worry about
is what my ex-husband can do from the grave.
We didn’t part on good terms.
But in spite of the terrible things he did,
it still seems strange to me
that he’s dead and I’m alive.
And maybe he thinks so too.