Thought experiment for A and B


In the museum, the model brain was blue,
with two molded lobes that swiveled on
sweet brass hinges, akin to geodes in
the Hall of Gems — all in all a beauty

for shape and the finely wrinkled surfaces.
But in time we knew that the living brain
is plasticity, making, and remaking,
a lifetime of emergence and distillation.

And that here, thought experiments can be formed.
In this one, a pair of entangled photons — A
and B — are far away from one another,
as far away as the homeland in a ballad.

A now wanders the heavens, on Neptune, say,
or Andromeda, while B, floats in a glass
in the shady garden they once shared.
But if the spin of particle A is changed —

mark this wonder — the spin of B changes too.
Simultaneously! No time is needed for this change
in basic reality to travel the fathom of space.
The message leaps over all time and space.

And this is science, quantum’s uncanny rules.
And so it is, my dear one (oh love, where are you now?),
that we know, we know, that distance is moot:
that A and B are never apart, no never.

First published in Green (Graywolf Press,1989); revised 2024
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