SELENA SPIER lives in New York City, where she works at the nonprofit Brooklyn Poets and co-curates the KGB Bar Monday Night Poetry Series. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in Pleiades, The Kenyon Review, The Threepenny Review, and elsewhere.
Somewhere in time I am nine years old, barefoot in the cockpit with my mother. She's holding a knife with an orange handle, showing me how to sliver the blade through the seam of an oyster's shell. Oysters taste like the ocean, she tells me. Sometimes there's a pearl. When she finally pries it open, I realize that I'd expected it to bleed.
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Are you traveling alone?
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Ways of measuring time: Sedimentary rock formations. Flotsam beached at the tideline. Radioactive isotopes. Snowfall. Snowmelt. Erosion. Blooms of rust on the underside of an undriven car. The valves of the heart. The appearance of certain constellations. A woman's hair. The fossil record. A day's worth of stubble. A week's worth of stubble. Windows whose glass is thicker at the base. The proximity of the moon, which is drifting away from the earth at the rate of an inch and a half per year. Ruins. Pencil marks on a doorframe. The proliferation of mold. Likening an embryo to different types of fruit. The accumulation of memory. Entering a theater in the afternoon and emerging after dark. Sundials. Ruins. Calendars. Ruins.
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Getting off the train in Kinderhook. The air is full of cottonwood seeds, feathery tufts that cling to our hair and pile up in the street like drifts of snow.
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In 1960, Wheeler discovered that wormholes are unstable. As soon as one forms, it collapses under its own weight like a soap bubble. The result is a singularity: a dimensionless point of infinitesimal volume and infinite density. The universe is riddled with them. Perforations in the envelope. A strange light shining through. No wonder I do not sleep well, wrote Wheeler in his diary. The old simple universe fades, all is now in disarray.
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Organic molecules collided in the primordial soup until they formed a vesicle, a breath enclosed by a phospholipid membrane, and inside of the membrane a polymer encoding information was sheltered, and that information caused the vesicle to cleave in two, and each descendant retained a piece of information and divided again and again and some of the membranes formed electrochemical gradients and the polymers grew increasingly complex and some of the vesicles started to merge with one another to form eukaryotic protocells and so on and now we have these special instruments for listening to the insides of each other's bodies. Dr. Tsatsaeva opens her eyes. Blinks twice, as if she'd been sleeping. She tells me that my heart is doing something strange, she's never heard anything like it before. "Like this," she says, and makes a sound between her teeth, like a clogged sink slowly draining.
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Now this connexion or adaptation of all created things to each and of each to all, means that each simple substance has relations which express all the others, and, consequently, that it is a perpetual living mirror of the universe.
—G.W. Leibniz, "Monadology"
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A railway station in Zagreb. An old man approaches and asks me in Croatian if I'm traveling alone, Putujete li sami. I nod, I don't know any better. He reaches into the pocket of his coat and pulls out a tin medallion, an icon of the virgin. He motions for me to hold out my hand, then presses it into my palm. For protection, he tells me, and walks away. He walks like a toy soldier, I notice—I think his knees won't bend.
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Time is subject to gravity. It bends in the presence of matter. It can be touched, it can be traveled through.
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A photograph of Wheeler at the blackboard with his students. They're constructing some kind of diagram or proof. Branching arrows, concentric rings, ampersands and brackets. Something about Leibniz, the monads. Something about Gödel. The outline of an irregular shape, but Wheeler's body is blocking it. An arrow pointing towards it is labeled "impossible to quantize."
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At the family clinic in midtown, Dr. Tsatsaeva is listening to my heart. Her eyes are closed, the lids translucent, a labyrinth of small blue veins. Heat leaves my body and enters the stethoscope.
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All of the fundamental equations, save one, are time-symmetrical.
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Information travels at the speed of light. The speed of light is constant. The speed of light does not exist except as a limit, a threshold. The speed of light is the still point that anchors the fundamental equations of physics. Its surface refracts, like the surface of a mirror.
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Wheeler believed that the universe was made of information. The act of observation collapses the wave function, the orthogonal axes of time and distance, position and momentum. Rendering the world, making it visible.
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Rebecca parks the car down by the marina and we sprint to the end of the dock, shedding our clothes like onionskin as we run. It's a new moon or almost, very dark. But the water is full of phosphorescent plankton, clouds of blue-green sparks that trace the movements of our limbs like echoes. I can see the whites of Rebecca's eyes, pale glint of her teeth when she laughs. I understand that whatever we are, it isn't contained in our bodies, any more than time is contained in a clock.
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Lacan wrote that an oyster is the only food that looks at you as you eat it.
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Einstein likened time to a mollusk—supple and yielding, elastic, sinking to accommodate the mass of the sun and other bodies.
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Anything that happens once exists in time forever. Salt and rust, rusted metal, salt-encrusted metal. My bunk isn't much—a bed set into the wall, two narrow shelves. I have a rubber piano that folds up like an accordion. I have a battered paperback copy of Hamilton's Mythology. On still nights I can hear the ocean, inches from my ear. Curious water lapping at the hull.
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A plane—say, a sheet of paper—can be folded such that two ostensibly distant points are touching. Imagine folding time like that. To make a sort of corridor. John Wheeler called them wormholes. Einstein called them bridges between sheets.
Still Life
Figure א1
The body is an asymptote converging to a limit.
A door torn off its hinges. A scorpion floating in amber.
If you diagram the body of an insect—thorax, abdomen,
however many hearts—you'll find it more complex
than you imagined. More complex than any star.
I didn't understand how something finite
could be boundless. In a room where nothing changed
except the distance from my feet to the foot of the bed.
Then the years began to repeat themselves.
Everything reminded me of something else.
You can interrupt a circle at any point
along its circumference and call that the end.
Cardinality Of The ContinUum
Volume 16.1, winter 26
Selena Spier
