Many Worlds Theory

Poem: The Theory of Mothers and Daughters

I ask my daughter,
the aspiring astrophysicist,
to tell me the theory, the concise
sentence, the undulating lines
of pure thought that describe
the theory of mothers and daughters.

Her mother cannot comprehend how
tiny strings vibrating in
a microscopic universe can hold
everything together: from DNA's
double helix to the silky translucence
of a moth's wings to Bach's
Concerto for Two Violins.
How it can all be reflected in
eleven dimensions: eleven parallel
universes wrapped in empty space--
a dark energy of nothing.
My one-dimensional mind boggles
as my daughter explains. But the messy
world of an atom's nucleus
(the photons and quarks, the positrons
and muons, the wimps and Higg's Boson)
all blur in my tired head.

She describes a famous physicist's
lecture and I can only imagine him
at the podium with mismatched socks.
Dark blue of sky mistaken for dark
black of night. No use searching my
finite space for a unified theory
when I can hardly recognize
my own daughter as she lives
more and more in her own universe
and leaves my small world behind.

The daughter who waxes and wanes
like the moon; loves me
and pulls away like the tides;
listens to a rock group
called Magnetic Field sing
about the unscientific mess of love;
loses car keys and forgets to turn off
the stove when the primordial soup
boils down to nothing.
The daughter who as a child
was lost in a Chicago museum
filled with the physics of Magritte;
and as a smaller child noticed
the silica shimmering in a lake
in Nova Scotia and deemed it diamonds.
This woman who now peers at the stars
in the night sky and sees
just as many diamonds. And
in the morning thinks the warm
air of a January thaw is not fog,
but the broken snow on fire.
The woman who knows the textbook
explanation, yet wants to believe
in the flames.

The daughter who looks at me
with my cosmology of tentative
words, tentative silence and tries
to see the mother: the proof
that she is my child. The proof
that everything, everything is connected.
Whether we dare to believe it or not.