Entry Poems

Providentia

The distance between Earth and M87* is incomprehensible to

this poor mind used to counting apples and years and fingers

And yet we crept across the globe

to Maxwell’s sturdy pedestal and to shield volcanoes

And to deserts where it sometimes snows

Even had the southern lights illuminate our patience

And quiet work of waiting for the atmosphere to smooth itself

in awe of our curious and stubborn effort

Catching light with metal mouths gaping at the sky

hungry for whatever length we told them

Feeding it into whirring little suits

Neat on their racks and proud as if aware of the importance of

their charge

And after months we crawl back with those boxes in our

hands “How the heavens have aligned”

We say and shake our heads and bend over blinking lights and

screens

Nearly praying that we're right and haven't just collected

pretty chaos or nothing or something

In hope we separate from each other and thus from a

particular form of failure -

There are only so many things we can do together without

risking the infection that was always there but only recently

classified as human bias

The importance of what is undertaken does not allow for

simple errors of the soul

So the work continues in single effort until the image is

revealed for the first time

Bleached by the morning sun and smelling like coffee

The seconds seem to separate around that lidless Eye

That black heart of the universe with its crown of fire

And drag around it ponderous and halting like an anchor

hoping to stop the world from going on just a little while

A hand reaches for the telephone careful not to disturb the

constructed sacredness of the moment

“It is done” the voice confirms and cuts human history in half

with held-back tears

But there is something more pushing through the static hiss

“We know” it seems to say “And whatever follows we have

known about this damned universe all along”

At peace Between Mondrian and the tree

lies a sea with many valleys, and in them the light is distant if at all light;

there may my pieces rest for all eternity,

or at least until the oceans boil away

and the Sun is a rotten blood orange

peering in the depths

where the dust of my dust is scattered

with the salt and sand, and entropy

to guard against my recomposition.

Huronian Glaciation

I was there when the world almost died;

trillions writhed at my feet in the tainted waters,

drowning in their own waste

which made its way to my lungs just fine

and I breathed the months away

watching as the ground was eaten by the ice,

then the rivers and the lakes

and finally the newborn oceans,

sealing away the depths of life

under white expanses stretching

for three hundred million years,

pressing down and extinguishing

flame after single-celled flame;

there was pleasure

in how they could not comprehend

that they had caused this

and swam on in pathetic seizures

as death descended from the ice

now too thick for any light to bore through -

in the dark their tiny bodies failed

and fell to the ocean floor

where pressure ground them into dust,

then to nothing at all,

and the world was thus remade.