of errata, yes, many, as I stormed the auditorium to propose, “the electron, the eldest of all
leprechauns—” when I meant leptons & you know what
I was thinking, physics
people, or no,
not really, because you laughed & said, good
one, thinking premeditated, poetic, pun, uniting
us all in the spirit of The Standard
Model, always not exactly anyone’s
pot of gold, shaky & more sheer
luck, laxing, lacking, patchy, paradox, & there I was
with my leptachauns,
when metaphor must be used in science impeccably,
speaking nothing of the slog
of how great theories come
together— like
us— so impishly, immobilizing, impasse, to get at
anything, when I was trying to move on, quickly, to how thrilling
was the discovery of the bottom
quark,
also called the beauty,
depending on your flavor— {oh, quip goes
the quark}— no, I was trying to say,
about having that Fresh New Particle
Game, what if through reasonable
error— that is, just an iota of precision
in prediction
tied to the whole nine yards
of a 27-kilometer accelerator ring—
that is, we shoot for actual experiments
& not simply the wanting
to find a new solitary
fairy in all that muck— tell me it’s not
sheer mischief, how we fiend for that fifth
fundamental force that will finally,
allegedly, remodel the rainbow
with just a modicum of decay—
what I meant to say, the end
of such rainbows might be the nit-
picking, the doubt, the delay
but have faith, there’s always
our dear Higgs
who leaps even this, the unknown as the living
beyond their meta-
phors,
cobbling so much
relief
from gravestone, gravitas
& grief.
