Dark Matter

A line on a blank page:
now is the time to recover. 

Whose fault it is
that you never became
the artist you thought you’d be

is unimportant. Unless
it’s your fault. After all, you took

the meds that kicked you over
like a traffic cone and now
conventional wisdom says

you’re too okay to make art.
Then you took the courses and now

you make enough money to live
paycheck to paycheck. School
got you here and art stayed behind. 

You lie nightly next to your partner,
screw enough to fall asleep, share life

and love and ease enough
to make the art seem dimmer
every time. You did it all.

Here you sit before sunrise
with one line on a blank page 

in front of you. The house is quiet
but for the grinding of teeth.
Now is the time to recover.

An ever-moving stone
at the bottom of a stream
rounds itself into sand,
loses itself in time. 

The stream loses itself
as it cuts into stone
to make more sand and thus
becomes a river in time.

Sit beside it a while.
In time you’ll also lose
enough of yourself
to become a new thing.

Will you carry the same name
you’ve always used
back from the riverbank
into your former world?

Do you believe
that world,
alone among all others,
will be the same when you return?

You will now hear a story
with the usual opening
and closing words,
but in between? There is

a stairway in there.
We see the stairs
and hear the emptiness
of the stairwell and how it echoes

when the climber is done,
but none of that is in 
the space
we call the story.

The story tells us just enough
of the climber’s life to feel 
we know them but of name
or face there is nothing in the story.

We find a single orange peel
on the landing between floors
and all we know of that
is that the story was written

to hide the rest. If there’s
a moral, it’s unknown. If there’s
a lesson, it’s hidden except for
what we already know about how

what we are told conceals
the why of the untold parts: why
the sweetness of the orange and
the strain upon the body of the hero

are left unremarked. Why we are allowed
to see so little and yet become
so engaged, to pretend that once 
upon a time we all lived happily ever after,

even the people in the stories we tell
who lived mostly in the gap between 
the seen and the unseen and did not in fact
tell us anything they did not want us to know. 

We never learned
this story of the Garden:

how someone whose name
is unknown now,

whose existence itself
has been erased,

stepped up after the Expulsion
to steal a kiss from one leaf

of the Tree.  Did not gnaw 
on the Fruit or lick 

the smooth hard Bark;
simply laid one small kiss

upon one Leaf. Wanted to be
able to say that they

had tasted the source
of Knowledge and then went on

through their life without
any consequence for knowing

just enough to get by;
to have a hint of Truth

linger on their lips without it changing 
anything inside them. Then they’d sneer

at Adam and Eve for being
so willing to go so far in on the Truth

that it ran them out of Paradise
and into the Wild.

We never learned this story of the Garden
because it was kept from us

so we would never dare to question
if they were right

and so we would never know enough
to be sure they weren’t.

All we have is a view of that sword over there
and the genes we carry that

keep us afraid
even as they tell us to try

and get by the flames
to see what we might be willing to do

for even a small taste of something
that will assure us of the way home. 

Fire, also known as
an expanded demonstration
of how quickly things may change 
when exposed to the right spark.

Water, a case
for how slow wear carves
such canyons that anyone
could lose themselves in awe.

Air, remonstrance
of solidity, the case for
flitting to and fro instead
of hanging on for dear life.

And earth, where it all
happens. Where blaze 
and flood and hurricane close in
upon your well-planted feet.

The mission? To live
as part of this elemental,
ancient, startling world, buffeted 
and altered by known and unknown.

To maintain or fall stale.
To factor damage into
the swinging of your intimate pendulum
and shift as your time shifts to match its pace.

To adapt or die
before your physical life
stops altogether without you
having known what it means to live.

I wish I were barely imagined,
unfleshed, a mere mist.

I wish I could simply float
above a fantastic beast

with rainbow-lit fur.
I could not ride it, could only hover,

doing the wind dance 
among others like me.

Singing along to choruses
with beings I only know

by their voices, voices
like my own. 

Instead I’m here, human,
burping and shitting, 

so embodied I can barely move.
My weight one mighty link

in a dark and silent chain.
Not a dancer, and I am no singer. 

If there is any grand beast waiting
for me to saddle it and ride

I fear for its comfort
if not its life, and 

as there’s no rainbow
to light our way

I will keep it safe.
I will remain here in the dark,

will become darkness itself. 
As heavy as everything would be

if it could be lifted. 
As stationary as if the world itself

were to suddenly tumble forward,
rushing away from its past.

All I can be is present
if I am to save anything.

Think of that scene
in a favorite movie 
where a silhouetted couple
makes love while
the Eva Cassidy version of 
“Songbird” is playing
on the soundtrack.
It’s not as if the couple
is playing it on some
device or sound system;
it is as if it hovers
over the bed of its own accord,
unheeded by the lovers,
unnoticed except by 
the audience who
are not actually there
in the world of the film.
It’s all pretend
except for the sadness and 
the ache you may feel
for the singer’s death, or
the longing for the fantasy
being played out before you 
in the imaginary setting
of a perfect scene you can, 
if you so desire, enter
any time you have time,
pretty much any time
you choose to be, any time
that makes you weep, makes you
lust, turns you into
a chaste voyeur until you close
your eyes and begin to hum
or even mouth the words 
to the song, your eyes slowly closing
as always, yet also as never before. 

How splendid it must be
to live an uninterrupted life.

To be one bird from egg
to last fall from a branch.

To wash up on shore
as one skeleton in littoral sand.

To leave no trace behind
that would prompt alarm or fear

of there having been 
an unnatural break in a natural span.

I think of every being
I have been: ones I lost, ones

I abandoned, ones
I suicided or murdered. 

How splendid it could have been.
I could have been an army by myself 

and won. I could have gotten
older and simply faded away

without leaving a body behind 
except one required by convention

for a final rest. Instead
I’ve left litter for folks to sort through

and bicker about. Who was this man,
they will ask. Which one

of these husks he left behind
should we revile or honor as his own?

How splendid to think
someone will choose one and make it so.

How splendid for me. I await an answer,
hoping I am able to rest.

Morning: opening
room darkening blinds
in January, acting
on hope

not that there 
will be light, as that
tremendous gift
is given; 

more that overnight
nothing will have made
what’s outside less
welcoming

than when they were
closed last night at
dusk. That there will
have been

no ice, no snow.
That there will have been
no casual vandalism. That
something still stands

of what we left to
night and shadow
when we tucked ourselves in
till this moment, hoping

it would happen
as easily as morning
can come in January, that
it would happen at all. 

Thinking of the nicknames I’ve worn
from the first one practically given at birth
to the few I’ve chosen for myself in jest
to the few I’ve been called out loud by others.
Were there ones I never heard, and still have not?

Wondering if any of them were close enough
to being my true name, one I should have worn
with pride and grace. A name I should have held
close and waved now and then as my banner
in battle, grief, and celebration. Wondering

if any of the ones I do not know
are more fitting, are more me 
than any I have gone by so far,
and is it too late to take on a new one?
Would I even be proud to wear

the closest fitting name?
Would I hang my head to know
that this was who I was, or would I 
instead retreat into the falsehood 
of the name I preferred?