A monk told me about how Niels Bohr

used Hokusai’s One Hundred Views

of Mount Fuji to explain the notion

of complementarity. The different lights …

that only together did they give the full

and impressive picture, the physicist

was reported as saying, all angles

adding to the fullness of perspective.

An electron not just a particle but also

a wave; the men we were not distinct

from the men we are – the reality

complex, the knowledge no less erotic,

the truth non-finite and momentous.

We are the same. We are different,

with saggier middles and deeper lines.

We are the ever-changing. If repulsion

sets in, this becomes a symptom

of a limited imagination. Think about it:

the body not an accretion of atoms

but a long wave connecting with more

waves to form an ocean, a flickering

orgy of unbounded energy. No longer I

but we are more than a sum of lives,

the banalities of dying. All light

to all dark. All breath and exhalation.

We are touching. We are moving apart.

We are a part of each other. Or we die

and are reborn as one another: the truth

so unprofound we forget it wholeheartedly.

We fall and rise. In the bigger picture,

the movement so unspectacular,

language becomes unnecessary

when love is no longer duality and time

disappears between a laugh and a final moan.