April 9
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	david j. rothman
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	DARK QUANTUM FOAM'S HEREAFTER
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	Step back. That's you, friend, sitting in your chair. Again--your home, your family, your car. Once more. The city sparkles. Go on, stare. The things you see are merely things that are. And now the planet, half blue, brown and white, The other half a region of deepest needing, Work, sleep, love, dinner, card games, death, delight-- Hey look, down there, there's even someone reading. There goes the moon, then Mars, Jupiter, Saturn. Now, voyager, the sun recedes into a cloud, Cloud into spiral, spiral into pattern, Pattern onto cloth draped like a shroud Of storms upon dark quantum foam's hereafter. And what's that sound . . . I can't tell . . . tears? Or laughter? (First appeared in Marginalia, vol. 3, no. 1)
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	about the poem
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	The poem is part of a long sequence of sonnets, villanelles, and other tight, lyrical forms, titled "Hydrogen Bomb Ignition Sequence." Despite that title, most of the poems in the sequence are love poems. In this case, I aspired to write a very tight form that would nonetheless move from the individual to the confines of the universe in fourteen lines--to see if I could telescope all of physical existence into such a tight form, the goal being the evocation of awe and of love for the creation. Quantum foam is a concept defined by physicist John Wheeler in the 1950s to describe the nature of the space-time continuum at infinitesimal dimensions, where it is so indeterminate that its endlessly shifting shapes (in his theory) resemble a kind of froth, or foam. If the theory is accurate, the background appearance of the entire universe at this level seethes with infinitely shifting alternatives of time, matter, and energy. The word "dark" in the title also refers to "dark matter," which many physicists now believe constitutes the majority of the universe's mass.
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	about the poet
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	David J. Rothman has been a finalist for the Colorado Book Award in poetry, and his poems and essays have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The Gettysburg Review, The Hudson Review, The Kenyon Review, Poetry, and scores of others. He also publishes widely in the mountain sports world. He is a co-founder of the Crested Butte Music Festival, the founding publisher and editor of Conundrum Press, and served for six years as the headmaster of Crested Butte Academy, a private, independent school. He has taught widely in secondary, higher, and continuing education and sits on a number of non-profit boards. He currently teaches part-time at Lighthouse Writers and the University of Colorado, and serves as president of the Robinson Jeffers Association. He lives in Lafayette, Colorado, with his wife and two sons.
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