Limbs

Limbs

I began, "we could live
in the octave-work
of night and day,
understand rush-hours as
biblical events,
or we could live on the scale of weather,
knowing that foothills are museum pieces:
mountains in transit from
monument to emptiness."

"But we must always remember that glass
is sand relegated to the borderlands
of the house, remember that ice
is fragile water."

Allow me to break for a moment,
because this is important
and I have no other voice.

We have found planets in orbit
around other stars, stars that you can
see from your porch in the evening,
and when you look from your porch
at these stars in the evening
a little bit of the light from these planets
orbiting other stars strikes the back
of your eyeballs and registers somewhere
in your brain (think of the language,
ganglia, vitreous fluid, optic nerve,
egocenter, cerebral cortex!)

This has always been true but now
it is known and now we might
call it planetshine and now
it registers in a different part of your
brain and perhaps you are thinking
of martians, or perhaps you are thinking
of me sitting here with a beer,
taking a break from this poem to
tell you something maybe
you didn't know.

I continue, "do you remember
the color of the sky (absinth)
on the evening of the big bang?
and sitting atop that cliff,
in the green autumn light,
how you watched me play with
these words in my scrawny hands?"

"One solid tension of skin pulling
my thin fingers towards my
esophagus, rubbery tendons
inside pulling at intervals;
calcite and carbonate
histories of our universe,
past stars exploded, future stars
waiting to coalesce
around this language,
around our choices,
before exploding again
and again."