is quoted as once saying, “Prediction is very difficult, especially
about the future,” some real comedic talent in evidence here.
I have no trouble picturing Bohr agonizing night after night
over wasting his great gift for making people laugh.
One night he dreams the dream about planetoids whirling around
a bright center—atomic structure! But he knows it’s not funny.
He sits by the kitchen window until The Big Mouse comes out
+
and with The Big Mouse comes the sadness again.
His open notebook reads “9 electrons walk into a delicatessen,”
the rest of the page erupting into rings around rings,
the impasse of concentricity.
He wants so much to slay, to really knock ’em dead in the aisles,
but he is constantly distracted by having insights into
the nature of matter.
And, later, the forbidding commitment to indeterminacy against
the self-anointed “citizen of the world,”
the popular Einstein.
about the future,” some real comedic talent in evidence here.
I have no trouble picturing Bohr agonizing night after night
over wasting his great gift for making people laugh.
One night he dreams the dream about planetoids whirling around
a bright center—atomic structure! But he knows it’s not funny.
He sits by the kitchen window until The Big Mouse comes out
+
and with The Big Mouse comes the sadness again.
His open notebook reads “9 electrons walk into a delicatessen,”
the rest of the page erupting into rings around rings,
the impasse of concentricity.
He wants so much to slay, to really knock ’em dead in the aisles,
but he is constantly distracted by having insights into
the nature of matter.
And, later, the forbidding commitment to indeterminacy against
the self-anointed “citizen of the world,”
the popular Einstein.
Harrison Fisher received his M.A. from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and a Doctor of Arts from SUNY-Albany (now the University at Albany). He held an NEA fellowship in poetry in 1978. From 1980-82, he edited and published the photocopied visual arts and poetry rag Bingo Chow. He has published twelve collections of poems since 1977 and has appeared in over a hundred magazines.
