Discovered Gjertrud Schnackenberg, thanks to, what else, Poetry Foundation. Here, an excerpt from "Sonata" though the whole thing ought to be read.
Development
I dreamed that an encyclopedia
Opened before my eyes and there I found
Analogies to sort of stack around
My what-is-life-without-you-here idea:
Like nous detached from Anaxagoras,
Like cosmic fire glimmering without
A Heraclitus there to find it out,
Like square roots waiting for Pythagoras,
Like One-ness riven from Parmenides,
Like Nothing without Gorgias to detect it,
Like paradox sans Zeno to perfect it,
Like plural worlds lacking Empedocles,
Like Plato’s chairs and tables if you took
The furniture’s Eternal Forms away,
Objects abandoned by Reality
Still look the same, but look the way things look
When I behold my life without you in it:
A screwy room where chairs and tables lack
Dimension from the front, the side, the back,
Like finity without the infinite,
Where tea parties are held without the Hatter,
It’s like a single point withdrawn from Space,
It’s like a physicist who cannot trace
The ultimate constituents of matter—
There is no evidence Matter exists.
Thus do I introduce Theme Number Two.
And I can’t prove it, but I know it’s true:
The physical eludes the physicists.
They’ve chased down matter past atomic rings
Into small shadows, and they’ve lost it there.
It seems that they can’t find it anywhere.
They stalk imaginary floating things
Like amateurish lepidopterists
Round babbling brooks and mossy fairy knolls.
Their net strings map out squares of empty holes.
Behold them snatching something in their fists:
Their fingers uncurl, cautious, on the sight
Of Nothing crushed against the sweaty hand.
But then I’m prejudiced, you understand.
Not everyone on earth believes I’m right.
But lest you think I’m kidding, or perverse,
I went to hear a Lecture just last year
About some things which I hold very dear:
The smallest pieces of the universe.
The Lecturer referred to them as Quarks.
He seemed impervious to the mystery
Surrounding their invisibility.
I asked, when he concluded his remarks,
“But are Quarks physical?”
You’d think that he
Were someone nearly martyred and I’d said
Our duty’s to die peacefully in bed.
He took his glasses off and blinked at me.
Were I John Milton, I would now destroy
This moment of high drama and deploy
A thirty-line Homeric simile.
But I’m not Milton, nor was meant to be.
He put his glasses on, and said, “Of course.”
Now, I may be the south end of a horse,
But logically and analogically,
And physically, and metaphysically,
And, if it gets to that, religiously,
And absolutely scientifically,
I don’t believe that Quarks can pass the test
Of Being There, and since they’re fundamental,
Why, then, the world’s a dream, and dreams are mental,
And since in mental matters East or West
I need you for this dream’s interpretation—
Stop looking at your watch, for I’ve divined,
With these two themes uncomfortably combined,
It’s time now for the Recapitulation.
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