Dark Matter

They once spoke of her blooming talent
as if she were a flower or at least the soil
a talent grew in.

They whispered of her dropping out
as the bloom coming off the rose
or as the fading of early promise.

They stopped speaking of her at all
and she was better off for it 
once the garden metaphors 

were gone and she 
could simply work
on what she was born to do…

Her brother on the other hand
worked hard and forged his own path
right up to the moment the world 

passed him by and he was cruelly
neglected until he disappeared
and it was a tragedy

they mentioned in every review
of her work from her first triumph
to the late career retrospective

which was titled 
“Final Fruits,”
of course.

I salute
the encircling arms
of whatever’s
holding me today

for keeping me
from falling

though I’ve tipped
and teetered
from sunrise
till now on the edge of
dusk 
and was not
at all sure that
a fall wasn’t
the best thing
for me

I honor whatever it was
that knew better
and held faster
to me
than I would have
had I been
in sole charge

Tomorrow may be different
Tomorrow I may
let myself go and fall

but tomorrow will come
thanks to whatever
held me today

The high wind has never died down
since that early spring day.

Drop something light now
and it’s gone. Drop something heavy

and the sound of it landing
might not be heard.  We all 

hold tight to our things, discard less,
build our possessions with points

for fasteners to hold them close.
Hats? Chin straps or nothing.

Skirts? Umbrellas? Things
of the past.  We’ve all gotten good

at handling kites, the Age Of Sail
has been reborn, and fossil fuels

are laughed at as a relic
of a stiller time.  That said,

we may never mention it
but everyone dreams now and then

of living underwater,
far enough down

that we could not hear the surface
if we tried.  In the worst moments

some climb to the tops
of mountains, open their arms,

and fall into the fatal gale:
same as it ever was,

same as
it ever was.

After decades
of considering
how behavior shifts
in light of circumstance —
of considering how concrete fact
trumps principle and opinion —
of considering how little
holds up as universal
and becomes parochial
and local
and particular —

how delicious it feels
at last to reach a point
where only today
do I realize
that yesterday
I did not judge
or assume
anything

about a couple and a child
moving slowly in single file
toward the swings
in the park,
heads down,
singing in a tongue
I don’t recognize;

and then
when I was humbled
into recognizing
my own self-congratulatory tone,
how resigned I became
to the work left to do,
to the distance left to travel
toward the day when I note only
what is necessary
and all I have to say is

how beautiful the park
and all its people
were yesterday.

Feeling
that you are going to collapse
and not rise again
for any one
or any reason
is not as bad
as actually collapsing,
it’s worse.  Once you’re down
all expectations are eased;
till then

you are at the mercy of 
the gravity
you keep denying
as you struggle against it,
and how alluring
the sweet fall
into utter disrepair 
or complete ruin
becomes.

Shine, then,
meteor,
if you become
resigned to the fall:
shine, like a son
of heaven,
all the way down.

I knew her
when she was,
at first,
all shell, all rind —
no, harder; 

steel hull,
bunker, castle —

I knew her
when it was hard to
know her at all.

Years later
we meet and
she’s 
split open — 

as she is now
she’s more of
a bare nut,
a ripe fruit,
a sweet
without armor.

I liked her better
the other way;

I liked me better
when I had to know her
the other way.

Bright painting
of a deity,
offerings of simple food,
small change,
red candles
to coax peace and fortune
from wherever they shelter,
to feed them, light their way,
invite them to stay;

a space as gentle
as a cathedral
is smothering;
as open to living
as a cathedral is
closed to natural order;
as intimate
as a cathedral is
hugely impersonal.

Any process
once begun
urges its own
completion,
which is why we
are as far gone
as we are;

we’ve stood on all peaks,
braved all fires
and all manner of storms,
sailed into the moon
from the edge of the ocean,
addicted to going hard
and going far
in all we do; and so

we spiral
toward ashes below
still singing our own praises,
indifferent to how far
and how hard
we are falling.

life as
a flight from birth
to death? no.
take birth
and death 
as givens, as 
constants, not as
origin and destination.
instead,

life as a reed
bending to breeze and
eddy in shallow current.
life as slender
moment.  life as 
curve adapting, life as
hollow waiting to be filled,
life rooted in one place,
topping in another.

it’s no journey, really,
if there’s no way to understand
what was before and 
what will come after.

It’s uncomfortable 
some mornings
to be alive and hurting
with a broken belly full
of unloved 
but necessary
food.

If this is healthy eating,
give me a gut full of air
and call me ungrateful 
for my privilege and 
relative ease.  
Tell me again

how many go hungry,
tell me again
how my own illness
is self-inflicted,
tell me how glad
I should feel right now
to be alive and here
in this body,

and I will tell you
that shame and guilt
for feeling such anguish
when I should be above it all
are fueling
what’s inside

where pain’s pain,
death’s death, and 
all I want to do
is make a swift
common cause
with the worms
who do not care
who any of us are
as long as
soon enough,

we are theirs.

After the dinosaur, the flight, the bird.
After the Australopithecus, the slow beginning, the man.
In the first tentative feather, the albatross, the poem.
In the first chip of flint, the automobile, the rock and roll song.

I keep a jar of egg teeth, bone Venus idols, hollowed whetstones.
I shake it to time the march of progress.
It’s not an evolution unless something vanishes.
It’s not an evolution if no memory remains of the vanished.

I go sometimes
to the border
and look back to you,
to the place
I’m from,
the place
from which I’m exiled.

I want to hold your hands again.
I want to look you in the eye
and tell you I’m sorry,

for you’re lost
as I’m lost,

and I think we’d do well together,
my flooded,
impossible to drain,
tumbledown,
insolvent,
sunken-eyed, sullenly
beloved homeland.

All I wanted
was to love you, to put you
out of our shared misery,
but what I call love
you call treason;

if we can agree
that both are true,
how about
you let me come home
and prove the former
to you?