Collider

The Higgs Boson was discovered first in 1994,
Called down from the air by a loose Riot Girl,
Escaping from the hiding place of old movements,
Buried where it failed 100 metres down in Idaho,
A giant ring of vacuum, hydrogen and super-cold,
Up under Kaniksu between Whitefish and Eureka,
A circling of places not known outside the state,
A small-town hiding place of permanent deep cover.

The thunder came with heavy rain that morning,
spinning, coldly through the drapes to wake us,
Two points in the standard model, aloof and still,
The foci of an orbit making particles from space,
In the old way, the only math of void we know,
Built out of the foaming ether, non-existence,
By any definition, turning into real things,
with systems, minds and thoughts of self.

The Teravolts of mind and intolerable regret,
That call in endless aches on sleepless nights,
Magnify the guilt of indecision - to coalesce,
As this ghost, this underwater banshee, silenced,
By the weight of ether, radiating only beauty,
In the pressing, marine gloom of recent record,
And she is history, unspooling through its paths,
To restart in a new rush of subatomic triggers.

There is sparking in her slow walk with static,
Dragging her kin from the surface of the world,
Until they dance and spin releasing light,
In proportion to her decorating formulae,
Equivalence of mass and energy, the old equation,
Its numbers turning through many human codes,
To love and war, to written history pinned down,
Like a moth on card, dead and fixed and gone.

Your age sees you, reflecting on the wear of years,
Thinking in numbers back to the cold of school,
Unmarked by rules or seeing further than required,
Or the strategies of ever-rising forecasts,
This young face in the ever-paler line of vision,
Is built of nothing, a temperament from vacuum,
Remembered from the timbre of some sweet voice,
A man-made character, uncoloured by acquaintance.