The Jeweled Net of John Stewart Bell, by Jon Wesick

The mystic physicist dreams a net extending to infinity.
At each vertex a Stern-Gerlach device
mounted on gimbals so it can rotate freely.
In his mind the device resembles a textbook drawing
of magnet with chisel-shaped, iron poles
that separates moving electrons according to spin.

Poets scoff. His metaphor lacks the romance of Indra’s net
with jewels that reflect all the others at each vertex
but how can light with its finite speed
maintain the Oneness of everything
in a universe billions of light years across?

Perhaps far removed from ordinary senses;
derived from slippery, abstract logic;
and detected in statistics of complex measurements
spooky quantum entanglement
allows instantaneous communion with your toenail,
the Great Wall of galactic super clusters, and beyond.

Useless! Useless! But a connection nonetheless!
Entangled in the primordial wave function of the Big Bang –
a dragonfly, rust-colored rock on Mars, atom in interstellar space,
stars, nebula, countless creatures on planets orbiting alien suns.
All are brothers and sisters
in a Oneness that communicates
nothing

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*John Stewart Bell was an Irish physicist who derived Bell’s Inequalities that have been used to demonstrate what Einstein called “Spooky action at a distance” in which a particle seems to transmit the results of a measurement done on it to its entangled partner faster than the speed of light.

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Jon Wesick hosts Southern California’s best ice cream parlor poetry reading and is a regional editor of the San Diego Poetry Annual. He’s published hundreds of poems and stories in journals such as the Atlanta Review, Berkeley Fiction Review, Metal Scratches, Pearl, Slipstream, Space and Time, Tales of the Talisman, and Zahir. The editors of Knot Magazine nominated his story “The Visitor” for a Pushcart Prize. His poem “Meditation Instruction” won the Editor’s Choice Award in the 2016 Spirit First Contest. Another poem “Bread and Circuses” won second place in the 2007 African American Writers and Artists Contest. Jon is the author of the poetry collection Words of Power, Dances of Freedom as well as several novels. http://jonwesick.com