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Light, A Disturbance

Jessica Reed | Poetry

What our senses perceive as empty space is actually the home of invisible electric and magnetic fields giving birth to self-reproducing disturbances that travel at the speed of light. …these disturbances are what light is.
—Frank Wilczek

No clouds, as if blue were all the sky could summon.

And in that blue, an infinite sheet of charge moving

parallel to itself. And a piece of field birthed here continues

on its own. Now, one field perpetuates another.

A kind of simplicity attained only when one is asked

to imagine what populates empty space. Can I

introspect? I might collapse, doll whose wooden joints are held

by elastic string. Or radiate pure physicality—I might pursue

until raw with exhaustion. Else I am darkness. Your matter

is an emerging from stirring fields. You are impermanent, made

of lasting pieces. Never empty, yet somehow arranged and shimmering.

Are these disturbances what my life is. Clouds gather.

I am never ready. Such facts become fine and sheer at their edges.