Happiness

is an undiscovered element.

We predict it,

calculate its mass and structure,

give it a symbol (Ha),

and seek a Philosopher’s Stone

to transmute our baser metals into it—

declaring it more precious than gold.

 

Accidently, we may glimpse it—there, in the gray liminal curve

where what we see brushes against what’s beyond the periphery—

but when we turn to take it in,

to see it full and radiant,

the unstable isotope of happiness evaporates into the everyday.

 

Heisenberg thought he saw something sub-atomic,

but knew he could not pin it down and know it all at once.

Happiness is that particle, that uncertain quantum blip,

that thing that we cannot grasp

without changing its momentum irrevocably.

 

Happiness is:

thick as a hopscotch chalk line,

heavy as a bubble bursting on a crack in the sidewalk;

its half-life is the first ride without training wheels,

the first warm press of a young girl’s lips and tongue.

Happiness neither was nor will be, only is—

when its snowflake lands on our teeth,

it melts in a moment, and we doubt if we caught it.

 

–sonnetsfromthepleiades