Elementary Magic

I remember first hearing rumors

of the atom. We are all made up

of crumbs, Q told me

when we were kids. In those days,

nature’s magic tricks were still

mysteries to us, secrets we sought

to unravel: how astronauts float

in outer space, how leaves turn from green

to gold, how the sea becomes the clouds

and the clouds become the sea.

Q’s mom was a scientist

who worked in a research lab

and conducted experiments with worms.

We pulled threads from her

spools of knowledge,

cut lengths of different colors,

and, with them, tried to stitch together

the universe. Atoms, Q said:

they’re what you’d end up with if

you cut yourself in half

then cut one of your halves in half

then one of those halves in half

and so on and so on until

you couldn’t cut yourself into

any smaller pieces. Nobody has ever

seen one before. It’s impossible, but

one day, when we grow up,

we will find a way. Turns out,

we are not so different

from the grass or rocks

or laces in our shoes,

all composed of inconceivable

numbers of atoms. In each of us alone,

there are billions of billions

of billions of them, more than

there have been seconds in all of history.

The revelations to the magic tricks

were magic themselves, as if,

when Toto pulled back the curtain

in the Emerald City, the Wizard

was not a fraud but rather

even more magnificent

than imagined. Back then,

it made perfect sense to us,

that by piecing together

these atomic LEGOs,

we could create anything

and everything we dreamed of:

castles and bikes and narwhals

and sugar and moons.

And dream we did

beneath the sky

as limitless and star-studded

as our imaginations.