God and molecules, nuclei and neutrinos:
you’re told certain uncertain things.
Told this is your mother,
whose coffined face you don’t know,
whose dress is a dress she’d never have owned.
If you could, you’d live below theory, subatomic
notions floating unseen. Helixed webs,
beyond life’s unparseable range.
You’d believe in spiders, though they too
occupy their own theoried world.
On ceilings, unfalling, they attach, reattach,
rappelling. Their silks
unconcerned with what gravity can do.
Your mother sat you, as a baby, in the shallows,
the lake licking your spine.
Her face then was all you needed to know.
There’s a photograph. Part of the web.
Everything beginning that moment,
untheoried, exposed.