by Kazim Ali
Begin with the dining room custodian at the university who smashed the stained glass window because we are actually going to change history
Imagine then in the suburbs of Cleveland a sculpture of steel rings broken in halves but opening up away from the bullet-written history of the burning helicopter toward the open sky
Seems possible because there is a bridge between relativity and quantum mechanics that no physicist has yet ascertained
Imagining neither a conditional future if the past was different nor forging ahead from the broken but something newer that bridged that loss
For example what if a painter who left the canvas entirely and instead looked at all the extant surfaces in the already man-made and man-frayed world
History then as fragile as stained glass and yet writes new narratives that shape every movement forward
Both ways of understanding the behavior of matter cannot both be true yet somehow they still behave as true on the lived-in planet
David Berger at 27 deciding to move across the world to Israel to train and compete in the Olympics, 1972 Munich
Continue reading the poem here.