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.
