An Impossibly Small Ball of Matter

Riddle me this—

I am fully naked beneath the sun

And at least ten thousand or so

Spinning balls of matter, each

Its own sun, if you’ll allow it, compelling

Even smaller balls of matter

Into orbit. When I was very young,

I would run quickly past the door

To my family home’s guest room-

Slash-office, where I would see apparitions

Of my father seated in the office

Chair when really he was out

Of the house until very late,

Only home long after all the lights

Had been turned off and everyone

But my mother was asleep. I would run

Fast past these apparitions, which

I knew to be then-present manifestations

Of my father’s future ghost. Anyway,

In my room I had a fish tank (all the fish

Jumped out of it, even the algae-eaters)

And on the wall a shelf where I would hang

Expensive snow globes I made

My aunt and uncle buy me in Florida.

(The shelf fell and they all broke.)

In the office-slash-guest bedroom, I loved to play

The Land Before Time computer game.

I loved to take screen grabs of the game

And print them on copy paper, feel

The damp green ink bleeding through

The page onto my open palms, smell

The damp green ink. I taped these print

Outs to the walls of my bedroom, where

I lay awake late into the night, afraid

Of the formless devils of green ink

Which pursued me through an endless

Black, a manifestation of nothingness,

In my dreams. Anyway, this room

Was the beginning of absence

In the world. In every ball of matter

There is an emptiness which can be

Measured by particle physicists.

I read online that before there were

More galaxies than grains of sand

On all the beaches of the earth, everyone lived

Together in an impossibly small ball

Of matter. We were just a bit bigger than

The universal-standard golf ball. It must have been

Incredibly hot like that. It’s hard to say what

Lay outside that ball—if that was

The absence or the beginning of everything

Else. So, in the office we had a mattress

That we laid on the floor with no bed frame,

But that came after the visions, and when

I ran past the room my dad was really

In there (suddenly he was home a lot),

And I would stuff suitcases with clothes

And say, “I’m going to go visit dad!”

And then I’d go into the room. If the world

Could be said to be like a glass of water,

And everything else could be said to be

Like a dated kitchen, I would look out

From the glass of water at the icebox

And wonder what sorts of things lay behind

The white door, maybe food, maybe a dead

Cat, maybe nothing at all, which I think

Schrödinger probably thought about, too.

If the kitchen could be said to be y, and

The glass of water x, I wonder what other

Variables exist beyond the kitchen, or inside

Of it, or just underneath it somehow. I have

A friend who is a particle physicist, and I hate

Speaking to her about the nature of reality.

If my friend could be described as God,

And I a lay person, I would describe myself

As enduring a deep-but-unspoken crisis

Of faith. If my faith could be said to be a ball

Of matter with measurable absences held

Within, I would close my eyes, imagine

A deep green enveloping me, and pray for

An end to my longing, for the green

To swallow me up, to become the green

And for the green to become everything,

For above everything to be the sun, and

In between all the absence.

____

This poem first appeared in print in The End 3: Death.

Matthew Dix lives in Charleston, SC.