"Schrodinger's Top Hat"

[bronze_ribbons]

This is an old poem of mine that appeared in Star*Line a ways back (July/August 2003). I'm reposting it here because it's still one of the better villanelles I've written, and because I'm being thumped by a quantum plotbunny (e.g., Dumbledore as Niels Bohr, Neville as Wolfgang Pauli, Draco as Werner Heisenberg, Lupin as George Gamow, Snape as Enrico Fermi...).



Schrödinger's Top Hat

Either there's a rabbit, or there's not,
but if you wait, a rabbit may appear
but even if you wait, it well may not.

Some might say that magic's merely rot --
a cheerful shake of superstition's snare.
Sometimes there's a rabbit, sometimes not,

but even if you skip the wheel and slot,
the sidewalks show more cracks from year to year.
Will your mother blame you? Maybe, maybe not.

It's hard to read the future when you're taught
not to cross each corner 'til you're there
whether rabbits wait for you or not.

And even if the scarves stay bright and taut,
will the coins fall freely from each ear?
Even if we wait, they well may not,

but 'til the fingers fail to catch what's caught,
joy can leap from nowhere like a hare:
either there's a rabbit, or there's not,
no matter if you wait for it or not.

~ pld

Comments

[mechaieh.livejournal.com]

I get this all the time from engineering students who tell me that they shouldn't be graded on their writing skills because they're engineers and I'm not teaching an English class.

Saints love them, do they think they're going to have minions to handle all their communicating once they're in the real world? (Don't answer that, I know they do. Rant for a separate time.) My husband majored in mechanical engineering and aced English Comp -- which apparently flummoxed some folks, which I find weird, since my own school was ALL about fostering cross-disciplinary competence. (Granted, some of us were far less agile at hopping around than others, but my inability to process astro computations and German conjugations was my own problem, you know?)

*sigh* I know that Snow was influential in his time, but I've no idea how pervasive "two cultures" thinking is/was. I do think there are assumptions that arise from split-culture perceptions that can be a pain in the tuchis -- as the lone literature specialist on both sides of my immediate family (all of the men and my older sis-in-law trained as engineers), it does feel like I'm often operating with different defaults and postulates than the others, and I wonder if that's what your friend experiences when trying to talk about her work with her parents (especially if they're anything like mine -- "Well, why don't you try this? how come you haven't done that?" "It doesn't work that way in my field") but as you note, that's a socially manufactured gap, not an intrinsic divide.

Re: botanical prints -- don't know much about 'em, to be honest. Some I've liked, some not. (I know, so helpful...) If you do send the something (and I'm touched that you're thinking of it), advising me what to look for/appreciate wouldn't hurt. :-)