Schrödinger's Alice
Poem - by Sarah Cannavo
If you rolled a rock
over the rabbit hole
once the little girl
was already
f
a
l
l
i
n
g,
she would be neither
in our world
nor Wonderland,
neither here
nor there
but eternally somewhere
in
between;
without looking down it
ourselves we wouldn’t know
if she was sipping tea
with the Hatter and the Hare,
playing flamingo croquet
with the Queen, stuck in
the White Rabbit’s house,
unlocking a door in a garden,
or if she was still in f r e e f a l l
through that passage longer
than logic says it should be,
passing shelves populated with
empty marmalade jars and
asking herself questions she
doesn’t know the answers to
(“Do cats eat bats?
Do bats eat cats?”)
until she dozed off
thinking about Dinah.
Scientifically speaking
—if Science’s voice can be heard
in a place like the one under
discussion, anyway—
as long as no one
rolls back the stone
to see what state
Alice is in,
safe on solid ground
at the bottom at last
or still falling,
falling,
falling,
we can’t say for sure
which it is or isn’t,
and therefore
she exists
forever suspended
in another state
altogether.
Curiouser
and curiouser,
isn’t it?