We know so little but the little we know
we place beside a neighboring bit or byte
of information, thereby shaping knowledge
as fields of knowledge, finding correspondence
or at least links among the fertile fields
or, as Robert Oppenheimer poetically said,
“a kind of lacework of coherence.” Lace-
work, lovely as it is, is full of holes,
or maybe one should say scattered abysses,
drop-offs into darkest incomprehension
or maybe one should say our state of knowledge
is raddled with abscesses, burnt-up cells, the windy
emptiness of old, failed, dejected men.
But now, let’s think of lace as something like
a constellation of stars, emphatic stars
cohering in an image of mysterious beauty,
Orion with his hunting dogs, the twin
brothers of Gemini arm in arm.
KELLY CHERRY’s ninth chapbook, Vectors: J. Robert Oppenheimer: The Years before the Bomb, is available from Parallel Press, and her twenty-first full-length book, The Life and Death of Poetry: Poems, is just out from LSU Press. Information about her other books and her awards may be found on her Wikipedia page.
