If I Were a Poet

She looks for him
in the dried-up flowers, but
she cannot find him.

A bouquet of daisies—
Each with forty white petals,
withered now that the water is gone.
Oh, that precious water which once gave life,
molecules flown away to join their brothers in the atmosphere.

Cosmic energies flung from afar
snap the familial bonds,
and atoms are split asunder,
exposing their internal organs
of protons and electrons
pulsing in uncertainty.

She dives deeper,
and glimpses
the dimmest sparks of consciousness:
Strange and charm, bottom, top, up and down…

down… down…
to the abyss at the bottom of reality,
where the quantum vaccuum cauldron boils
with virtual particles
winking in and out of existence.
Even there,
she cannot find him.