'A Pristine Caldera of Consonants'

The subject of quarks came up in conversation with an electrical engineer. We didn’t linger but I got to explain its etymology. The word for the subatomic particle was coined by the physicist Murray Gell-Mann, who borrowed it from Finnegans Wake: “Three quarks for Muster Mark!” In no conventional sense can anyone “read” the Wake but it can be fun when consumed in bite-size pieces. 

According to the OED, quark existed in English long before Joyce, though not as a cousin to the lepton. As a verb, since the early nineteenth century it has meant for a bird “to utter a harsh call or quawk; to squawk.” A century later it came to mean “a type of soft, unripened cow’s milk cheese of German origin, with a low fat content and smooth texture.”

 

But when I hear quark I think of a typically ravishing poem by Eric Ormby, our libertine of words as pure sound, music on the page. “Quark Fog” is the first poem in For a Modest God (1997). I suggest reading it aloud:

 

“Let matter take on the shape of elands,

The hieratic pongo or the great

Eager emptiness in the spaces of love.

I ponder the temporary desert

Of my hand, Matter will not

Chisel a voice from this

Fog of quarks.

 

“If merest fable drops into the fog,

Articulated stars assert

Eclosion of the gold-sewn chrysalids.

Early nouns bob in blunt fens.

Verbs browse electrically in mist.

Particles gnarl the stems of bulrush copulae.

In a pristine caldera of consonants,

Vowel-magma brims

And virginal horizons spike

Cordilleras of speech.

 

“Sweetheart,

Let haggard worlds await

The proton’s aboriginal decay:

 

“Our sun is uttering her saffron palatals.”