In the dark place between a night and a day

I find myself lost

In Winnipeg there is a gravestone marked with my name

in which lies a man whose silhouette I see

in the mirror every morning

Do I exist in the minds of others I wonder

In the earliest hours I give extra water to the tangelo tree

which cannot give fruit unless a lemon or mandarin is near

When no one is awake and no friend is near

I find myself disappearing and yet able to hear

sounds half a mile away

Bell’s Theorem teaches us you can really only have one of two

worlds: a real world in which particles remain entangled even

at great distance or a local world in which nothing is real

unless it is observed

In either world I do not exist

June comes around and the lemon blossoms but the tangelo does not

Newton was as confused by gravitational action

at a distance as we are by quantum action at a distance

Einstein solved it by showing how the fabric of space bends

around large—planetary, lunar, stellar—mass

Local reality does not apply to the Universe

High above the earth still orbits the Micius satellite beaming photons

to the Earth in a continuing effort to understand why particles

are entangled across space and time

I have already outlived the man with my name by two years

We try pollinating the tangelo by hand but so far

there is neither bud nor blossom

Since the sun interferes with its mechanisms,

Micius only operates at night

The local world is not reasonable

There is no solace in the Universe