TEXT poetry

Gershon Maller

In the belly of the physicist

Quale: what a thing looks or feels like to each person.
— C.S. Peirce Mind and the World Order (1929)

To quale is too tense a verb to parse
nor does quale name nor qualify quark
distant twins who never in the quantum
belly of the physicist in the same orbit
of invisible worlds were made to spin
as disappearing into radiant flux, its tail
flicks through flickering waves of blue
white points of red light, bitter sweet
as desire’s first fleeting kiss; as from
the heart the quale is drawn to blood
a thought by sense, flowering a rose
of gorgeous nonsense, passions we must
fail to quail from beyond reason or like
this punnet of strawberries quite resist.

Poem with its throat cut

Descartes has cut poetry’s throat.
— Boileau (1636–1711)

I think, therefore, I am curious
to trace to pith a trace of myself
along the clear line of live nerve 
waiting for synapse to flare its arc
briefly into figure of first thought …
I am sensual but of the senses none
nor sensibility, nowhere to be found
in body nor mind, an object without
subject even in speech donated to science
fully awake eye for eye beneath scalpel
but René, as you cut the lyric chord
trying not to choke the pain, in this paean
for pronoun shot through with fiction
know never in my own voice do I speak.

Melbourne based poet and editor Gershon Maller is author of the collection Nights in The Gardens of Spain (2002). His poetry has appeared Overland, Poetry Australia, Going Down Swinging (AU) and The Wallace Stevens Journal (US), among others. He holds a PhD in Literary Studies from the University of Queensland.