how I would like to crush the blossom of this month.
Fall splits in two.
You are the definition of joy.
I compare you to the light glinting
off the bridge, the glass
on the shoulder of the highway.
Every stupid song on the radio.
You be the sun this time.
Try me day in and day out,
and night, like alternating currents.
18,000 chord progressions—
an infinite number of tones.
The spark isn’t gone, the spark doesn’t go anywhere.
The shock of first touch
remembers itself; the way lightning travels up.
When we beat the spark into life.
When we warm it with words.
When it grows to a flower,
how surprised we are.
How easy love is.
October gets on with its self,
color draining from the leaves,
as if beauty is a trick of the light
returning.
Gravitational forecasting
Fall splits in two.
You are the definition of joy.
I compare you to the light glinting
off the bridge, the glass
on the shoulder of the highway.
Every stupid song on the radio.
You be the sun this time.
Try me day in and day out,
and night, like alternating currents.
18,000 chord progressions—
an infinite number of tones.
The spark isn’t gone, the spark doesn’t go anywhere.
The shock of first touch
remembers itself; the way lightning travels up.
When we beat the spark into life.
When we warm it with words.
When it grows to a flower,
how surprised we are.
How easy love is.
October gets on with its self,
color draining from the leaves,
as if beauty is a trick of the light
returning.
Gravitational forecasting
. . . . . . . . .“My life was still a mansion to be filled;
. . . . . . . . .now it is an overstuffed trunk I’m scared to open.”
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Lauren Hannon
We are sitting on the beach
along the cliff of falling rocks
guessing at our futures when
a man comes along and tells us,
“The area of falling cliffs is off-limit.
That piece of rock you are sitting on
was attached a week ago.”
And sometimes we are not sure
if we are the cliff-face or the rock.
Black hole and event horizon.
In space, linear momentum is maintained,
until acted on planets continually fall
toward the sun (sunward)—
witness a giant object such as a star contract—
This is for Lauren whose absence
is an absence in my own presence.
This is for Lauren
whose future is my enclosed space—
Sometimes I think the world rests
on your back alone, (as in the time in Jersey
your shower caved in,)
and sometimes you are the star contracting,
gravitational attraction
like nights we drink wine on the beach
because judgment is the first thing to go
but then you still have everything else,
put yourself in the wrong place at the wrong time,
we could see the space of us contracting—
the way an explosion is really a series of explosions.
Internal pressure, a mechanical process, almost as if
forecasting itself. Marvel at the first surprise:
the astrononomic evidence of us—
we have too much luck to spare—
so often we confuse two things
for what they really are.
And this is our future, we are,
There are some dying languages
where there is no future tense.
The closest we could come is
the last words of a lost people:
“as into the darkness of a storm.”
A star contracts, we are that star
the space around that star contracts.
(We are.)
