Lisa Higgs
Talking to My Daughters About God
“The ring in which you are but a grain
will glitter afresh forever.”
Nietzsche, Notes on the Eternal Recurrence
Easy to forget when you’re eight
and untutored in the rights of the holy,
you have no touchstone for the untouched,
which makes virgin a word as simple
as daguerreotype, for which you also sought
definition after some reference heard off
public radio earlier in the week. But
you’re eight, and your sister at eleven
has read the body book without
a chapter on babies, so I start with Mary
because it’s a week past Christmas,
and you know enough about the star
and manger to see specialty in a surrogate
birthing a god, unaided from the start
by the hands of a man. I can’t help
mention property, propriety. The real
message is a warning: how I lost
religion in this vision so delicate
the slightest brush of fingertips
could forever tarnish. Or in a desire
not to be locked behind some enclosure
of glass. I never bought a religion’s
insistence in men at the head, even more now
when men as head seem again eager
for the fight. So we try to separate god
from the warring faiths, locate the what was
before science’s spark, and the why create
if life means accepting only one half
the image, or only that which mirrors.
Or even less. We begin to think
science and god aren’t so different,
the natural world as random and unfair
as an unconcerned creator. We talk
about bilingual Jane, her T.V. virginity.
And Aristotle, Einstein. Energy that cannot
be destroyed, which you say is as close
to god as cinema’s force – also wrapped
in battlefronts and fictions. I avoid
Nietzsche, though we are circling
eternal return, because I can’t imagine
yet fully a world where humanity
means so little to itself. A world
floating in some thin space between
silver-plated copper and mercury fumes,
its image unmoored from its casing,
meaning a world all too easy to erase.
Unified Field Theory
The passage of time depends on the particulars – trajectory
followed and gravity experienced – of the measurer.
Brian Greene, The Hidden Reality
Suggest: time, as acted on
by gravity. Light stream
of photons or mathematical
waves based on your
language. Is strength
direction, the movement
of gears, switch of teeth
by valley, and your second
split in the ambient
radiation that makes each word
on each page clearer?
The centenarian sees each story
in the paper as human
oscillation. We repeat, in time,
repeat. In time, Einstein
sought to unify fields.
But only the two named
in his time, now four,
and we repeat tooth
to the valley. Numbers
can be words. As words emit
from moonglaze in wind
whipped waters, the stain
of diatomic slides.
Is there a theory of such
communications lodged
on record? To unity, then,
we repeat. And hope.
For a perspective better
than our own. A space
that lives life right.
A time, to repeat, a light
when the potential
needs not escape as actual,
but holds true to the best
dictionaries of all language.
So all can mean I have done
my share. And let go,
time, light, in elegance.
--
Lisa Higgs’ third chapbook, Earthen Bound, is forthcoming from Red Bird Chapbooks at the end of 2018. She is poetry editor for Quiddity Literary Journal and has reviews at Kenyon Review online and the Poetry Foundation.