Schrödinger’s Moon

“Nature doesn’t give a damn

For what physicists think

Is pretty math,” said Sabine.

Start with a moon and a myth

That makes its pulsing white disk

Narratively tractable.

Add myths—anthropomorphic

Demons and monsters—to taste.

Gender the moon as you please.

Mostly, people would stop there.

Some made a cult of counting.

Next thing you know—calendars.

Keep calendars long enough,

Down enough human lifespans,

Heavens, look at those patterns—

You can predict eclipses.

Maybe your moon’s still mythic,

But now you’ve got some traction,

A hook for kings’ attentions.

Look more closely. Grind lenses.

Correlate planets and tides.

Moons everywhere. Gravity.

A few generations of this

And someone’s on the surface,

Puffed up like armored popcorn,

Planting a flag in no wind.

Your moon’s one stone step to night.

Children, everyone knows this,

Give or take conspiracists.

But why? ask the physicists

In their imaginations.

Something remains half-finished.

Something’s a quarter complete.

Some penned calculations showed

The moon rose from them by halves

In vast superpositions

And other fun abstractions.

Tonight the moon’s sickle sets

Over mesas and harvests

The smoke that our narratives

Have raised as a puppet scrim,

Exposing us, bare and scared.