So They Say— They Finally Nailed— the Proton’s Size— & Hope— Dies—

but love does not, Menelle Sebastien.
Of all the afflictions
& luck,
all the sums & paradoxes,
& gravitons that add up
to more minus
than plus,
I promise that love
is often as inconsiderate as it is just
because actual love,
I imagine,
is a wave function
that isn’t restricted
to being
in any one place
at one time.
No, love must
be a superposition
with a measurement problem,
but don’t worry,
I won’t get into alternative
realities & how a single judgement
from one can so easily
dissolve
whom,
or what,
she’s sizing up—                & yet,

                              when experts speak of capturing
vastness at such a small scale,
I can only see the passenger
pigeon
flitting into living
sequoia trees,
& every blue whale
sinking into the great
barrier
reef
& all the threats each are facing,
all these gigantic things
that beat
within the size
of a subatomic being
that is the proton,
which is not fundamental
as love
ought to be—

                            & maybe it does all
add up
to a single hush.
Like how we try to escape
what makes us human by trying
to make sense of what made us
human.
These days,
when I think on the proton,
I only observe love
as entanglement
in which we bias & sway & touch
over great,
great
distances.
But like I said,
I won’t get into it
like the quark’s fate
& all the possible quantum trickery
out there,
lying in wait.
I don’t believe hope dies
just because old measurements got it
wrong & there are no secret lives
between protons & muons
that cause the former to change
in size,
silencing all the music
that drives us
toward mystery
rather than discovery.
Maybe just thank
electronic hydrogen,
since, for now, there’s an answer,
even if it feels like a dead end—

                                                       because I’d bet everything,
                                                       that at least something began
                                                       over this:                         jounce,
                                                       butterfly & cower ::
                                                       over & oeuvre,
                                                       greedy, hunger,
                                                       & sour—

                 until aching
                 each other’s spoils,
                 stripping bare
                 their delicate
                 & deadly
                 creaking
                 coils—

Copyright © 2020 by Rosebud Ben-Oni. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on September 24, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.

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“Back in 2010, physicist Randolf Pohl and his team replaced an electron with an identical but much heavier particle—the muon—and made a measurement of the proton that indicated that protons shrink in their presence, suggesting a new discovery of unknown, strange interactions between muons and protons, perhaps even unveiling new laws of nature. But in 2019, Eric Hessel and his team came along, re-measured the proton, and found that, alas, the proton does not change its size. So while it’s a wonderful thing to actually know the size of a proton, it takes away the excitement of possibility itself. It was around this time similarly a friend of mine told me that she was giving up on love, and I was still thinking about how “getting it right,” so to say, took away so much imaginative possibility from muon-proton relations—how answers can seem like dead ends when you just want more—and yet, there is still so much we don’t know about the laws of nature, just like love, and the poem came out, in one go, from there.”
—Rosebud Ben-Oni

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“well

hello young lady
hello, so chilly today”

—“I saw Emmett Till this week at the grocery store” by Eve L. Ewing