Summer, Fall
No longer lanternflies, leaves
now litter the 45th Street
sidewalk along the hospital.
In the summer I walked
for a much different
reason than today,
under light’s breeze
shifting clouds
by the cemetery
I called home
twice.
_________________
James Croal Jackson
Review by Massimo Fantuzzi
Two seemingly incompatible conceptions can each represent an aspect of the truth … They may serve in turn to represent the facts without ever entering into direct conflict. (Louis de Broglie, from Dialectica, Vol. 2, 1948)
Poetry and quantum physics meet here, not for the first time, nor for the last. To tell us something that to a writer might seem obvious, but will cause a physicist a lot of headaches. Summer and Fall can and do live in the same space and at the same time, new life and death, health and illness can occupy the same reality, past and present live in the same experience, where left or right turns are just two ways of describing our straightforward motion. Bright lights filling the air or fading colours littering the ground are two descriptions of the same presence. Two calls, one home — or two homes, one call — again, it amounts to the same.
In this strange labyrinth how shall I turn? / Ways are on all sides, while the way I miss (Mary Wroth, from A crown of Sonnets Dedicated to Love)