Quantum Mechanics

~ перевод "Квантовой механики"

You'd think he came to the shore to watch a ginger-haired dog
lying as though a towel left by a beachgoer in haste,
staring into the horizon blurred by thickening fog,
hearing the repetitive lament of rocks being ground by waves?

No. His reason for coming was as blatant as that
of a rowdy who says he picks fights, because he just likes to fight.
That the doggy was gingering the monochrome of the sand   
is far from being the point. Simply put, never mind.   

The point is this: he just needed a cubic meter of air
to breathe in a lungful of molecules from the arbitrary cube.
Chiefly, he craved those of oxygen, and, just to be fair,
The dog nearby was getting oxygenated—though unconsciously—too.

But that was just the beginning—he wondered what would come next,
when his air-filled chalice drained itself to the lees:
he'd heard of the hollow vacuum as a bottomless nest
of other provisional "particles", quant, unquant, and as is.

Yet, if only those quanta could trickle down his throat,
the ladles still poured out some extra, like hearty gravity's soup.
And then they lavishly offered some time and space for dessert.
Was that the end of all? Bite it! It was an infinite loop.

I can't really say where exactly all that infinity ceased,
but, all of a sudden, an impulse emerged in him, picking its way—
through all his quarks—to pet the ginger-coated beast,
which sensed it through all of its quanta, its tail thumping the gray

sand of the beach.