A Child’s Garden of Physics (1) - Andrew Philip

Trauchled by the paraphernalia
of a life spent tinkering
— the long stands, the mundae hammers —
MacAdam settles

to cobbling light apart
into constituent darknesses:
pit mirk, pick mirk, part mirk, heart mirk.
Even so, there’s hardly

enough mirk in this world
to account for the breadth of black
he thinks must lie
at the core of everything.

And here it is, nestling
in the pleasant land of Counterfact,
spreading as the sun droops:
the fundamental particle of night.

It shades in/out of being
the way MacAdam does when not
observing himself at a distance,
his anchor ego flowing

through various queerlike states
akin to the nocton’s flavours:
still, thrang, change, dread,
silent and sudden. The quirks

the hour has flung at him
gather in the corner of his shed.
Now, armed with the tools
to measure the mirk aright,

he can take to the streets
to ascertain precisely what
the afterlight is made of — this
could be his service to us all.

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