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.
or at least until the oceans boil away
and the Sun is a rotten blood orange
peering in the depths - WOW the "rotten orange" theme in your poetry! Either we both listened to No Doubt - Don't Speak MTV Video, or it's strange and worthy of exploration coincidence