In the odd world of the quantum, things appear to exist in a multitude of states — describable only as the set of probabilities known as a wave function — until tipped into a definite outcome by an act of “measurement.”

John McCrone

... the absolute flight and rest
The universal blue
And local green suggest.
- Robert Frost
I

I am floating or falling. I am light
as a feather, or even my thumbprint

fills the sky. The water near shore
shines silver on a cold Spring day.

A helicopter punctuates the air
and I imagine, further out, there are fish

drifting mindlessly in subtle currents
deeper than green goes. Fish made from atoms

streamed and condensed to the hard steel bliss
of shape; fish

of whose precise location
I am dreamily uncertain.

I imagine the bends: how pain swoops
to painlessness the way smack takes you

away from yourself. Vertigo. I feel bubbles
of nitrogen fizz distantly in my cool toes.

I imagine fins, or changes in current
surmised, in the dark, as fins.

Yet the heat in my head and the light
on my eyes are the same blue day’s

convergence. This is a miracle of sorts,
a fleeting miracle between horizons.

The same blue day, one world below
and one above and one world here and now.
II

I am a wooden boat.
From the wooden deck of me
my anchor drops away
to sound the fathomless sea.

The mossy chain gains speed
uncurling through my hands.
On the wooden deck of me
I stand between two lands

and neither made of land:
the lands of sky and sea.
Deep in the wind my kite
unfurls transparently.

It reaches far away —
this kite is quite a thing;
and yet I touch the sky
because I touch this string.

And touch the ocean floor,
that ache of dull content.
But the wooden deck of me
is the place of measurement.