Heisenberg Saying Goodbye to Mum at Lilyfield Poem by Luke Davies

Every construction is temporary, including the fire altar.
 — Roberto Calasso

Accommodate the action in your life
to wrest the deep perspective of the real
from cubic content realms of atmosphere
at play beyond the bank and shoal of time.

Then resonance begins, and all vibrates.
The syntax of position no more sculpts
this world of interpenetrative forms
than syntaxes of motion render grace.

Yet syntax is the caul on all our births;
and mothers claw the membrane from our eyes
to fret us into life, in losing theirs.
From there, each choice engraves a different choice.

The decades pass. One needle for one groove.
The canticles flare chaos from the spin.
The gyre to crackly zero stays the same.
(You've got to love the Hindus more than most.)

We saw grand sweeps of swells from tiny arcs.
We sliced the wave face, tumbling into light.
My mother hugged me good-bye at seventy-three,
knowing, just then, her strength may outlive mine.

Accommodate the action in your life,
she said, to aeronautical exhausts
of every plane and cab I ever caught
(my own arcs more elaborate than most).

Accommodate the action of your life,
she seemed to say: make past and future fuse.
I felt her fingers dig into my back:
That strength I had is yours. Things die. Not love.