Five Poems by Lindsay Remee Ahl

Forthcoming in Vestiges_03: Mimesis

In the Land of “Let Me Roll It To You”

In the history of physics, it was clear by 1907 that the atom
was substantially empty space.

I call my teenage son, who is in New York. “I’ve been playing Lake Street Dive’s
cover, Let Me Roll It, since you’re not here,” I tell him.

“Someone’s got to,” he says.
Every morning, he used to play Let Me Roll It and I Don’t Mind

by James Brown, live at the Apollo in 1962, as loud
as his speakers could take the sound.

This morning, I woke to the absence of his music, my dreaming
substantially empty space.

I had been wondering fiercely about the voice within—how
to follow it at all costs no matter where it takes me?

In the wake of empty space, I walk streets through morning light,
end up in a dry river bed, sand deep, the street merging into river

sand, arroyo past low slung houses, ragged cottonwoods.
When I look up the street sign says Griffin Street.

I lean into a wall, glance over, and there, on someone’s mailbox:
Au Griffon, a little schulpture, like the one beside the doorway

to the Chette Shop in Paris, 1901. My theory on the empty space
in an atom—that’s what the Griffins were supposed to be guarding.

The secrets got by them, each slow discovery added up.
“I’m in Strand Book Store,” my son says, “what Hume should I buy?”

My encounter with Hume was brief, that military expedition
to Brittany in 1747, during which he was working on his thoughts

on Events—they are either caused or not and sometimes we can figure out which.
History begins as empty space, either written or not written,

created or not created, and in that arena the physicists watched
the atoms in all their spatial glory and too witnessed

the electrons jumping their orbit. According to Hume, the moral evil allowed
by God on earth is “beyond reason” and therefore beyond philosophy.

At the unknown interview in the foyer, Griffins guarding, they were playing
Let Me Roll It—even though the song wasn’t written yet, even though

my son wasn’t born yet. If your son went to war and died for his country.
If Rutherford disintegrated a nitrogen atom into an oxygen atom

in 1918, and by 1932 had accessed forces not mechanical, by splitting an atom.
We used to ask, “Are you worthy of the music you listen to?”

a challenge we welcomed, the answer usually “no,” as music opens questions
of sublime mystery akin to Hume explaining the snake in the garden.

Really, What isn’t beyond reason? in the end.