Sometimes I don't want to be crystal clear in a poem, even a short poem. Sometimes I want the reader to figure out the meaning without having it spelled out. Poems that make you work a bit tend to last longer in the memory, I believe.
This one, written as far back as 1993 and published in my first collection - Thirteen Ways of Looking At the Highlands (Diehard, 1996) - is an example. To have been explicit here would have been wrong. It's a very short poem, but probably needs reading two or three times. I've long forgotten where the particular setting was, but it was a beach with shallow water where you could walk out a considerable distance without getting out of your depth.
I haven't read it in public for years, but every time I did read it, someone would come up to me and ask, 'Did you mean ... ?' And yes, I did. The sea is a scary place, and maybe it's not always obvious why it is. Sometimes you do get out of your depth.
Tides
Walking far out in the clear green sea,
watching waves at eye height
just that little bit further,
I begin to fear, not being overcome,
but losing, for no reason,
the urge to resist letting go.
Copyright © Colin Will 1996, 2015
Saturday 20 June 2015
Sunday 7 June 2015
The quantum physics poem
Although I worked in geological and botanical organisations, I've got a fairly broad grounding in the other sciences, and quantum physics has always fascinated me.
Back in 1998 I walked the Fife Coastal Trail in five sections over some summer weekends, and I managed to write a poem in each section. Four of them were first published in the magazine Fife Lines, but this one wasn't taken. It did come out in Snakeskin, and in 2011 I put it in the Kindle edition of Seven Senses, where it's in the company of the other Fife walk poems. It's available from Amazon, where I've published several out-of-print titles. It pleased me to imagine Fife fishermen named Heisenberg and Schrödinger, and to place the uncertainty principle and Schrödinger's cat paradox in their watery context. I also love the Scots word 'plouter'. It's what I do. It's what most of us do.
I haven't quite managed to write a poem about collapsing wave functions, but some day I might.
The physics of fishing
(Fife Ness, 1998)
An eider arrows over the waves.
In the depths below the bobbing floats
Heisenberg’s lobsters may, or may not,
lurk in each weighted pot.
The uncertainty is resolved
when Schrödinger gaffs
the suspended line, reels in,
and curses every stolen bait
and empty creel,
in the manner of all Fife fishermen,
then plouters home through the swell
to poison his cat.
Colin Will
Copyright © Colin Will, 1998, 2011
Back in 1998 I walked the Fife Coastal Trail in five sections over some summer weekends, and I managed to write a poem in each section. Four of them were first published in the magazine Fife Lines, but this one wasn't taken. It did come out in Snakeskin, and in 2011 I put it in the Kindle edition of Seven Senses, where it's in the company of the other Fife walk poems. It's available from Amazon, where I've published several out-of-print titles. It pleased me to imagine Fife fishermen named Heisenberg and Schrödinger, and to place the uncertainty principle and Schrödinger's cat paradox in their watery context. I also love the Scots word 'plouter'. It's what I do. It's what most of us do.
I haven't quite managed to write a poem about collapsing wave functions, but some day I might.
The physics of fishing
(Fife Ness, 1998)
An eider arrows over the waves.
In the depths below the bobbing floats
Heisenberg’s lobsters may, or may not,
lurk in each weighted pot.
The uncertainty is resolved
when Schrödinger gaffs
the suspended line, reels in,
and curses every stolen bait
and empty creel,
in the manner of all Fife fishermen,
then plouters home through the swell
to poison his cat.
Colin Will
Copyright © Colin Will, 1998, 2011
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