The Weak Force
Maybe we went spinning out of a womb that flashed, a particle accelerator, and something massless broke away that looked like light, resembled small souls that could only be inferred. One morning in Bio Lab I cut along the ventral surface of a fetal pig, separated the red latex-filled arteries, on the qui vive for gullet and a heart that never beat outside its mother, something nonetheless escaping beneath a gloved touch neither force nor memory, the odor of preservative scalding the eyes, because looking was infinite with the particles of strangeness and charm, where the thymus and the base of the tongue languished without impulse or speech, this silence only decay, this intricate homologue of wing or fin now mirroring what we owe to creatures who walk on the tips of their toes—yes, it must have been cruel to see us rise and go, full-footed, out the front door. All that farewell. All that I’ll tell you where I am, among rumors of huge bombs in a desert, the absence to come of so many. History and violence confused in their anatomies with liberty, with a protective covering, a skin that stiffened into an odorous surface with no further life.