You can dip into it like a still pond, breaking the reflections of sun and leaves and things. Like a painting you can dip into it. How odd the water is not cold or hot or warm. How odd the water is not. Yet, you can go under or in or into it. It's not like looking through a glass popcorn popper while the image is eaten away by puffs of white, accompanied always by a shrill alarm. No, it's not like that. It is quiet, absolutely quiet. Not even a breath or gurgle is heard, like listening to a black cake. It is gray, absolutely gray in all directions, like inside a sock. But it's not like a sock, because it has no weave, because it has no edges, not one thing to fasten an eye to. It's more like a fog. But not like a fog. A fog shifts like strands of hair in air, it has a body, it moves. Nothing moves here, not even the gray moves. Somehow you know if you had a stone and released it, it could drop in any direction. Like in a deep well, it would drop with no familiar plink, not even the hush of cutting air, soundless as a muffin. It's like being at the negative end of a magnet. Picture the diagram in a science text, lines all radiating out, illustrating that unseen suck. But it's not like a picture. It's more what a picture isn't. It's like the ground that a picture of sun and leaves and things is laid over. It's like that dimple between plink and plunk. Except, it's not a dimple. It's big, so big it makes you want to scream, like standing on a mountain shouting through space to hear the echo. But you know that if you had a voice to scream, the sound would seep away into the gray nothing, unanswered.
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The poem “O” relates to the quantum field with the lowest energy state or ground state. It is a vacuum or zero-point field. The theory is that all fields have some particles or virtual particles, however in deep space the few particles are believed to be further apart. So the poem is about that place where few if any particles exist. To make my point I compare it to our everyday existence where particles are clumped so close together they appear as solid objects.
First published in Passages North Vol 13, No. 1, Summer 1992
