Human Entanglement

After they split the atom, broke our water into hydrogen, and hydrogen, and the oxygen
you couldn’t breathe, we and the hydrogen wandered the universe, searching
for oxygen

for what you were
before the water broke, swept you down the river
through the rocks over the steep glide of waterfall—the dam that stopped us
for that moment, before we knew what it meant to become
an ocean of loss.

I have to believe in the physics of love:
that if two particles—quantums, atoms, humans—become entangled, simply observing one
will change the other, instantly, whether separated by light years,
or six feet of earth, or a sheet in the bed
your mother and I entangled in:
just her eyes upon me
were enough
to make you

what you might have been: a reader, a lover, astronomer, discoverer of the light in Pluto’s
blue skies, spinning moons, rocky mountains enclosing a heart
shaped glacier the size of Canada.

If only we hadn’t split
open, when I see a trace of you
in a playground, a cloud, the trees, a bird
I wouldn’t have to believe
that our quantum of love
will break
the speed of light,

that I did not swallow
my breaking
after we lost you down the river
that you and I and your mother
and your sisters and our dogs and goldfish and rabbits
are of the trees, entangled, through the earth, the stars,
the light years
that will never break
between us.

Woman, Falling

across the aisle, three hours and two glasses
in, she’s asleep in her seat, her torso leaning majestic
as a willow at dusk, her swaying
hair brushed aside by the river of youth
striding down the aisle, oblivious
to the splendour of a mother, asleep.

I’m flying home from my father’s
interment. Below us out the window, I see nothing
but billowing cumulous releasing their innards
onto the ribbon of smoke rising
from what was left of him, released
onto my mother’s bones, as he’d put it,
wryly—the woman he fell for
seventy years ago. As we descend

through the cumulous, the woman
leans further into the aisle, uprooted
like the willow that finds itself
on the banks of a washed-out river.
I want to reach across and gently
ease her back to the open, upright
carriage of her youth, and say
to these youth in the aisle—
do you see her now?

But that would be
presumptuous, imposing, as obtuse
as the sagging bones of my own face
in the tiny bathroom mirror: someone else’s life
already lived. For I myself
could not lean across the aisle
without bruising a rib, pulling a lumbar,

let alone know who I am
or who I was meant to be
or who I saw in that mirror—
my lost self, now become
my father’s lost self
who has finally become
one with my mother
crossing his last river
to his first love.

Karl Meade’s work has been long-listed for five CBC Literary Prizes, shortlisted for Arc Poetry Magazine’s Poem of the Year, and shortlisted for The Malahat Review’s Open Season Creative Nonfiction Award. His writing has appeared in dozens of literary magazines across Canada and the U.S., including Literary Review of Canada and Painted Bride Quarterly. His poetry chapbook, doom eager, was published by Rainbow Publishers in 2023.  Find him at www.karlmeade.com.