Joel Chace lives in Mercersburg, PA and can be reached at jchace@epix.

net. Widely published in little magazines, he's the author of The Harp

Beyond the Wall (Northwoods Press, 1984); Red Ghost (Persephone Press,

1992); Court of Ass-Sizes (Big Easy Press, 1995) and Twentieth Century

Deaths. He's currently a poetry editor for the Antietam Review

(Hagerstown, Maryland), as well as the electronic magazine 5_TROPE.

<heisenberg>

little

boxes with

1's in them

***

at the age of five he was

quite shy and sensitive his

parents fostered a constant

competition with Erwin

his older brother there is a

later photo of the two boys

with their father as he

"marched off to war" wearing

a light colored greatcoat that

in some copies of the print makes

him seem partially

invisible

***

the path comes

into existence only

when we

observe it

***

at Gymnasium he became

fascinated with the mathematics

of the number

system itself "because it's

clear everything is so that

you can under-

stand it to the bottom"

***

1's in

boxes that just

fit around

them

***

even into

his early 30's he

spent most of his time

with the Youth Movement his

group devoted weekly

meetings mainly

to culture German

music poetry song always

maintaining strict

rules of ethical

and moral behavior inter-

actions with women rarely

occurred music poetry and

nature occupied practically

their entire thoughts

***

the intermediate stages of this

process occur in less

than almost a billionth

of a billionth of a

billionth of a second and are

not observable

***

knowing very well the purity

of his pre-marital

life close friends joked that

he would slip out late

at night to beer halls where

he would proposition

women by using "atomic

spectral lines"

***

the wave function does

not represent the

density of charge

or matter

***

he had no idea how

to derive the resolving

power of the interfer-

ometer nor of such

common instruments as the

telescope and the microscope

when an angry Wien

asked how a storage

battery worked the candidate was

still lost Wien saw

no reason to pass the young

man no matter

how brilliant he was in

other fields

***

if an electron and

a positron col-

lide to produce

a Z is the

Z a virtu-

al particle

***

"since my talks with Bohr often

continued till long

after midnight and did not

produce a satisfactory

conclusion

both of us became

utterly exhausted and

rather tense"

***

and even harder to

figure out in green

chalk looked

like a tipi then

an X another

tipi then a

p then maybe

a pointing arrow-

head underlined after

that a little h that

someone had

crossed and finally

a slash and

a 2

***

Nazi scientists began

to lay siege to quantum

mechanics and relativity as

"Jewish physics" he became

the trail blazer of German

war-time fission research ac-

cepted a new position at

the University of Berlin 1942

"think of the time after the cat-

astrophe Planck had said and

I felt he was right"

***

"all of my meagre

efforts go toward killing

off and suitably

replacing the concept

of the orbital path that

cannot be

observed"

Joel Chace