By Charles M. Sumid     Copyright 2025     Written 2018

Dr. Zeng teaches quantum mechanics at nine,
differential equations at eleven.
Between classes, she kneels in the courtyard,
collecting dandelions with the focus
she brings to wave functions.

“Perfect spheres,” she whispers,
blowing seeds into probability clouds.

Her office: tensor calculus
on every whiteboard, except the corner
where she’s drawn a dragon made of clouds,
labeled Cumulus Rex in her careful hand.
Students think it’s a fluid dynamics model.
She doesn’t correct them.

In her desk drawer: thirty years of notebooks,
each one half equations, half pressed flowers.
Page 73 of Advanced Mechanics:
a four-leaf clover marking the day
she solved Navier-Stokes for herself.

In Quantum Field Theory,
between renormalization and gauge symmetry,
she’s drawn Nimbus the Probability Pup:
a cumulus spaniel chasing his tail
around Feynman diagrams.

Office hours, and Rowan knocks,
needs help with boundary conditions.
He finds her reference book open to Schrödinger.
Between pages 247 and 248:
a dandelion pressed flat,
its seeds arranged in Fibonacci spirals.

“Professor?”
She looks up, sees him holding
the pressed summer of 1987,
the year she first understood
infinity wasn’t just numbers.

“My granddaughter and I build sandcastles,”
she says, as if this explains the pressed flower.
“Last week, we made Copenhagen.
All towers, no walls. It collapsed beautifully.”

She returns to boundary conditions,
but Rowan has glimpsed the margin notes:
tiny castles sketched in pencil,
each one labeled with particle names.
Quark Castle. Fort Boson. The Lepton Keep.
And there, a single seed caught
in Fort Boson’s imaginary mortar.

After Rowan leaves, she takes her eraser,
brushes it lightly across the whiteboard’s edge,
not to remove but to soften
where equations meet the cloud dragon’s tail.

In the courtyard below,
dandelions wait for tomorrow’s probability lesson.