When we moved in July, it cut everything in half.
Our old friend, in his grief, carried with him his rusty razor
trying to divide his morning cereal,
his noon-time sun,
and his evening reading.
We were a Higgs Boson—
a catchy phrase for an impossibly complex idea.
Without us his beard grew raucous,
and his face was bloody from the hacking.
It was all very embarrassing.
It was a line of sand—
without width or depth—
and yet we continued to measure the heaps:
one represented before
the other, predictably, after.
The more we swept, the worse it got.
The little summer, one half collapsing into the other—
a singularity again—if they exist—
was our best result:
Wavering.

Here.            _______________________________________________________ Here.

And—

Here.

__

I wrote this poem the year I moved from California to Chicago. All things that year seemed divided in two. The images (the heap paradox being only one example) all sprang from this feeling. If one removes a grain of sand from a heap and begins to build a second one, at what point do those individual grains of sand become a heap? I then associated this conundrum with Occam's Razor, which deals with unnecessary complexity and simplicity. It brought me finally to the image of the Higgs Boson--a yet undiscovered particle that would help demonstrate how massless particles play an essential role in creating mass.