The Ether
--Rae Armantrout 

We’re out
past the end 

game where things
get fuzzy, 

less thingy, 

though in past times
we practiced 

precision
concrete as a slot machine. 

But to be precise
you need to stop 

a moment
which turns out to be 

impracticable
and besides 

speed is of the essence. 

Don’t worry. 

“Of” can take care
of itself 

and it’s fine
to say “essence” 

now that it’s understood
to mean ether, 

a kind of filler
made either 

of inattention
or absorption 

somewhere near
the Planck length

[via poetryfoundation]


Visualization of the "Planck length" (per wikipedia):

The size of the Planck length can be visualized as follows: if a particle or dot about 0.1mm in size (which is at or near the smallest the unaided human eye can see) were magnified in size to be as large as the observable universe, then inside that universe-sized "dot", the Planck length would be roughly the size of an actual 0.1mm dot. In other words, the universe is to a visible dot as a visible dot is to Planck length: The diameter of the observable universe is to within less than an order of magnitude, larger than a 0.1 millimeter object, roughly at or near the limits of the unaided human eye, by about the same factor (1031) as that 0.1mm object or dot is larger than the Planck length. More simply – on a logarithmic scale, a dot is halfway between the Planck length and the size of the observable universe.