Plank’s Constant

or 6.625 x10 -34, How I Hold on to Light when Life gets Real

When I’ve gone day- dead in my mind- dull shoes, I need a gleaming shoe- horn to pop my person to life; I need edges to press my- self out of; and I need a gleaming number, a metallic bracket, a stain- less steel frame to press against the sky. I need a hand to keep my mind in; I need a cup of light to define some spot to stand in; I need to know that radiation is as discontinuous as water: I need to wrench my face toward light and drink and drink and drink the sky. I need the specificity of wonder to make myself even try to stay alive; to climb back into the miniscule unit I have placed against my present -ly flattened plane of comprehension, I need to pantomime the field to fully flesh dimension; then, when space pops the world, all-at-once, out its coordinates, expanding mind, attitude and mood in all directions, I need to slip a silver wedge between my heel and time; to find my mind, I need to step into the place where I can press to push the precisely placed decimal of my self.

To equalize the forces between the condensation of my time as body of light inside of light,

I need to compress this storm of wild flashing feelings, incalculable light ricocheting inside the gut that reminds me

I must push down as light on light. Plank’s Constant is precise, defines the energy of each photon with the frequency of light applied.

I really must find a way each day to press its edge against the abstraction winging like feathered brushstrokes, flocks of white —

I have never seen, but have felt birds fly outside their bodies inside my gut that is my mind

inside the mind that holds — I mean that tries to hold — onto sky

— perhaps everything is like birds without the bird defined:

so to keep the whelm inside before my time for world is over,

I must settle down, slip heel back inside my shoe, press sole to toe again and again and again against the hard packed dirt:

I walk the world around its decimal point, push down to release the energy, relax to simply let my steps be multiplied by light —

to be precise, I must hold constant —

be conceived as the one the baby counts on to help her hold on to and distinguish all those wriggling possibilities that try and try to defy her meaning when she determines to show the digits that define

just how many she is; yes, I must try try and try to be there for the ones

I have left to live for: I must imagine there is a Cosmic unit called a life time, and even

as we all are just frames of fumes, star-holes for stars that barely make it through our puzzle holes before disintegration, before our bits and pieces catch fire, cool, recollect and combine, and even though it sometimes feels contrived to be a unit inside a spacetime so always here and never there, so much everything and everywhere (all orbs in orbit swirling in and out of all-at-once) in a world only alive

because love happens, still love must happen before it can die,

and although today is just another page that accumulates between us;

I must be come plot to point;

be the key that relates the uncertainty of position and momentum to myself; I must become one with the silver flow that fits energy through measured mind and be, simultaneously, the hole that moves it through —

and so, I slip key between heel and shoe, step down, fit inside-to-out, and walk round and round and round

the block: you died. And, now

I must somehow stay inside my body to survive.

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —

Thanks for reading! I wrote this poem way before my favorite movie, Everything, Everywhere, All At Once came out in 2022, but, since you’ve read this poem, and if you’ve seen that film, you will understand how well I relate to the main character, Evelyn, artfully played by Michelle Yeoh. What’s more, I loved Sylvester and the Magic Pebble, the children’s book that inspired some of the more transformative scenes in the movie, way before I ever knew I would someday be audience to a story that gets me so well.

The movie verse-jumps, and the donkey in the book turns into a rock to escape a hungry lion. As for me, when I wrote the poem, I just knew, I sometimes don’t feel solid in place and time, and that my mind phase-changes as I move through daily life, and since it seems like space-time does too, I often feel both intensified by the piercing wonder of it all, and at loss for a way to hold on to the energy of all that abstract angst.

When I wrote this poem, I also knew, and know, how much it hurts to be on the other side of time from someone loved who holds you to the point of it all.

So, anyway, thanks so much for being here! I appreciate your place and time — your focus helps me solidify, your reading helps me flow…