North Shore Bigelow Bay, Slocanada, 9 July 2017

At Fermilab and CERN they found, years

Apart, evidence for charmed baryons

Paired, respectively, with down and up

Quarks, and although their measurements

Of mass so far refused to square each other,

The physicists making their reports spoke

Almost casually of instability, one baryon

Decaying within fifty millionths of a billionth

Of a second, the other in thirty millionths

Of a billionth of a second. This was not 

Armchair introspection, this calculation

Of creation and decay on scales

Of millionths of billionths of seconds.

"Appeared to decay instantaneously," 

Glossed the New York Times, but there was

No instantaneously, probably never was.

There were intervals down to infinity,

In each of which something happened,

Something arose and disappeared, became

Something else. Body was back on the dock

Where a rotten plank planted the whole

Corpus in driftwood and gravel, painfully,

Already more than a month earlier. The heat

Beat down. Machinery roared in the woods

Clearing a new path where spring floods

Wiped out the last. The water, blown glass

Mirror with faint wavering reminders

Of uncertainties in all mirrors, all measures,

Apparently didn't care. Every small ripple

Of a wave across the long pebbled arc

Of the shore contained two billion million

Millionths of a billionth of a second, so that

A Blakean universe might have arisen 

And been lost forever, unmeasured, 

Uncelebrated, unknown in the nonce

Between when body twitched and a wave

Caressed the edges of its dead awareness.