Charlotte Innes - The Uncertainty Principle

Charlotte Innes is the author of Descanso Drive, a first book of poems (Kelsay Books, 2017). She has also published two chapbooks, Licking the Serpent (2011) and Reading Ruskin in Los Angeles (2009), both with Finishing Line Press. Her poems have appeared in Valparaiso Poetry Review, The Hudson Review, Tampa Review, The Anglican Theological Review, The Sewanee Review and Rattle, with some anthologized in Wide Awake: Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond (Beyond Baroque Books, 2015) and The Best American Spiritual Writing for 2006 (Houghton Mifflin, 2006), amongst others.

The Uncertainty Principle

after Infinity, a painting by Annie Clavel

“Can love change?” you say, “not ours of course,” as you flip the burgers in a pan. I force a smile. “What do you mean?” Meanwhile, fleets of Nazi warplanes buzz my thoughts and the heat of the kitchen turns my sweat to blood. “Now sauce,” you murmur, searching the fridge. Some say divorce, oddly, can topple liberty – with remorse, or grief for good times, sucked on like a teat. Can love change so much you want to ditch it all? “It’s Claus and Marguerite,” you say. “They’ve split.” But the source of what you’re thinking – we both know. I retreat, warrior woman facing fire, till a sweet smile turns wasps to diamonds. This shifting discourse. Can love change?

Pandemical #6

Naked again, she twirls along my street, sits down in traffic, picks up stones like plums, inspects them, throws them away. Katha screams, Miguel, Miguel, where are you, Miguel? He comes at last, lays down a blanket and they sleep, unless they’re high. Then it’s a night of curses, screams. By morning, the sidewalk’s inches deep with litter. For Miguel and Katha, home. For us sheltered people, already fearful enough, their life’s a deluge flooding ours, a madness we can’t control—for all our meetings. It’s rough. The screams break us apart, ignite old sadness.

Worried for our health, we envision viral droplets filling the air. Two people, I tell myself, of hundreds. All the numbers spiral. To the East, more madness. This won’t end well.

After Driving Home from the Crematorium

Remember how you forced yourself to wait in the sparse shade for ten slow minutes for the No Parking time to end, and how, except for the distant river rush of cars, there was quiet, the late light deepening till even your dusty feet seemed to shine, and how in the awful weeks to come, you hung on to the way that light at certain times can thicken pastel colors, thicken the air, as if it were a presence, and how that made you think, not of the stillness that is death, nor of the body that is not the body, but of quiet afternoons, of waiting, the back of your neck burning in the heat.

Stone, Glass, Wood

after a visit to Lincoln Cathedral

A dog is peeking round a pillar, with an impish sideways glance. A fiddler—what? both man and lizard?— sings to a sprawling girl in back. With eyes closed, she seems entranced or smashed. A party. Carved in stone. Why not? Today, through high windows, the late spring light conveys a canny whisper from the sun: enjoy! Savor the lacy canopies of wood, the polyphonics of misericord and reredos.

Applaud the colorful scenes on glass that glorify the Lord, the pictures of sinfulness, or hell, the sequel, that kept the people terrified— so clerics thought. Praise the masons’ skill in carving human cravings,

viz., the lecherous serpents curled round Adam and Eve, the sweet bottom of a naked boy dancing, or comic replicas to tease their friends, two men with pudgy cheeks, a louche, an almost toothless man, yawning.

If glass is sacred transformation and wood can soften into beauty, earthbound stone smirks at how we scorn each other, why we laugh, like the impish dog who seems to breathe, play on, but careful, trouble’s coming.