If you want to know the answer to everything—
& by this I mean how to land on the moon
styx, the smallest of pluto, just to stick
a wreath in its water-ice
& leave, without even taking
a photo—then I can tell you
I too got it wrong, giving all
my attention & ache & ardor
to the electron, who’s too busy binding matter & clearly
too stable, holding our heads up & keeping our hearts
in the dark. The electron looks after reality, keeps it going
somewhere & doesn’t peacock with mystique, no, that’s you
pitching salt as you cross the black cat
with a ladder. That’s you & another
you who have so little belief
in each other that youronly
bond is whispering
Macbeth in the dark
theatre & rattling
every full house
for hours, every hand dropping a glass & turning
into the toss of a breath, sleep no more, no less
than spinning a parasol indoors with one sock on, both shoes on a table.
That’s the unbinding of a human condition. That’s eyes straining to see
less, before the mirror that breaks itself
every billion years. Think carefully now,
how you2 are never in the same room & when “you”
are, it’s the only refuge & the other is intruding.
It doesn’t matter who wins. It’s what can’t quite
end: what is not a thing at all, but a disturbance
that does not exist
until it’s discovered,
& yet when it appears,
it ceases to be? Because
that’s everything, I promise. It’s just *you’ll * never
have it, since the photon is not receptive or self-
evident & yet the answer to yourtrillions
of moons that orbit swift disturbances.
But look at you. Look how even
if {you} get the smallest bit
close, {u} creep & cant
that they circle urown dust
& hands, busy sticking everything
with cut flowers & wedding bands.
As if a surface
digs itself deep
into the light u believe *u*
grasp. As if there’s no other
evidence that life did,
at one time, flash before
its own
divine.
Source: Poetry (December 2019)
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