Introduction to Quantum Theory

There are only so many parallel universes

that concern us.      In one, he isn’t dead.

In another, you drink light with your hands 

all winter. There is a universe in which no one is lying

emptied in the street as the gas station burns, a universe

in which our mothers never learned to wrap

their bones in each small grief they found.

There is a universe in which there is no difference

between the past and the ground. Another

where the oceans pull the moon.     And so on.

This is an incomplete list. It has been abridged

for your comfort.        I could tell you

about the many universes in which bad things

happen to people other than the people

you love. Yes, in another life, it’s someone else’s sister

who climbs the roof that night. In another life, 

the boys rise darkly from the asphalt to choke

the engines of cruisers, and no one gives birth

chained to a hospital bed, and no one’s child washes

blue, ashore. Sure. You can have these worlds.

You can warm them in your hands at night. But know: 

by signing, you agree also to be responsible for the universe

where the oceans glow red, the universe where what we 

call shadow is pulsing with the musk

of hooves, and especially the one in which 

humans exist, but only in the nightmares

of small children. Will you hold that one too? 

The version of the story that never learned

to consider sound? And the one where sound

is only the opposite of metal? And the one

where the sound of metal is never enough           

to quiet the dead?