Dark Matter

Come to the table
and I will serve you
all you’ve asked for:
look, it all awaits

on formal china
with proper silver
set beside the plates
in proper order,
all laid out upon
the best linen,
spotless
and soft.

I promise this to you
in the name of propriety
and all I have tried to do
to explain my faults away,
at which I have failed
in spite of decades of 
effort. 

You tell me 
I should have just tried harder
to not have the faults
in the first place
and we would have been fine
eating little but bread 
with our fingers and cheap wine
from old jelly jars
while seated upon stones
in a ragged ring around a fire.

I look at this table,
think of all
I’ve spent upon it.

I look up at the vaults of heaven.

I am not at all sure
I’d be the same person today
if I had done what you asked.

Perhaps that is your point:

if I’d been welcome
in the house of your God
all along I would have been

a different man;
you would be here,
and I would not.

Riddleface Mountain
is on my bucket list
of places to visit after
I die. The name

tugs at me like a pup
on a cuff. I want to hover
before it, a midair ghost;
stare into the granite,

and let it make me whoop,
delighting in the punchlines. 
I’d have that slight twinge
of regret when I guessed right

and then of how I’d beg for another,
another, squealing for more. 
At some point I know I’ll need
to float away and see the rest

of the land around those parts.
But before I do, I’ll hang suspended
before the cliffs
of Riddleface Mountain,

laughing one final time
at moments of silly human delight
as if I were a four year old
delighted by small things.

Some days
we wake up
inconsolable
atop a mountain
of bones.

We settle 
upon the summit,
snow caps waiting for
the full sun of hoped-for
summer.

If the mountain
is tall enough
we may never
melt free
and pour back down
to the green lands;

in the mountains of bones
some peaks remain
frozen forever.

A day will come
when we pass and become
bones waiting
to be grieved
and covered by those
who loved us once;

for their sake and my own
I pray I shall not end up
part of a mountain
that will never thaw.

I eat all the words in my head
as soon as they arrive.

I surge from skinny to fat then skinny again
ten thousand times a day, ten thousand times

a minute even. I’m a pulsar, not a man:
huge for a flash, then vanishingly thin again.

If they ever stop I suppose I’ll become normal.
No more extremes. No me to be found. 

1.
To have been here as long as you have
and seen so much without seeing 
how little you have mattered 
in the ways you were taught you would matter

and at the same time not understand
how instead you were of the utmost importance in small ways
to the continued spinning of this Rock
where you have lived your whole life

is to prop yourself against a grand doorframe
and insist you are in fact in the room where you truly belong
as it dawns on you that you are truly in neither room
and you’ve never lived anywhere that wasn’t Limbo

Let me assure you that you look just right standing there
Let me assure you the doorframe understands your confusion

2.
To see how bifurcated you feel 
when there is no need to stay that way
is to miss a world defined entirely
by existing under a door frame

If there’s a single God it is one with the doorframe
and not in either room on either side
You are there to be a part of that divinity 
and to be serene in seeing how all rooms are one room

If there’s no God you may do as you wish 
and move between rooms or stand between 
and if there are instead a multitude 
ask for a tour and come back to the doorframe refreshed

Let me assure you the view from there is genuine and complete
Let me reassure you that you may lean there as long as you wish

In the corner of the front yard
Siberian Iris are preparing to bloom:

flat blades, oval buds. Every year,
I imagine a ship with that image

blazoned on the sail. I am waiting for
the ship to launch — but how it will go

from solid land into deep water,
I cannot say. The iris whispers

one thing, logic insists upon 
another. It’s a mystery,

of course, how to move
from one world to the next;

how to trim the sails, 
how to set the course.