Dark Matter

If a dark chocolate
ice cream cone
appears in mid-air
between you and a child 
in danger, you will 
no doubt push the cone aside
as you rush to the child’s
salvation.

If the sobbing child
is comforted when you
turn back to seize the cone
and give it to them,
you will eventually convince yourself
this has all been 
preordained and that you
were indispensable here. 

You will cease questioning
the appearance of the cone
in the crisis moment, assuming
a divine intervention or
alignment of planes
created this, and you
will feel no horror
that a child
may have been endangered
just to help you feel special,
that magic was forced into service
just so you could feel heroic,
and that the anti-gravitational nature
of the final piece of the scenario
was a conjuring that had a meaning
beyond the moment; that you 
were in fact a means to an end and
as much a mere cog 
within the situation
as all the rest
of its elements were.

The rejected being
was appointed to
a special committee
examining the status of 
healthy creatures. 

The press photo of them all together
in their meeting room was
lovely enough: everyone smiling
broadly, any tension in their eyes
probably a result of bad lighting.

The rejected being took it as
a small step toward acceptance
that the camera
picked them up at all 
as there had been periods

of utter invisibility
in their career. Times when
they knew they’d been at the table,
had done good work, been acknowledged
in the group, and then disappeared

from view almost as soon
as the work was wrapped up
and tied in a neat bow.
(Theirs was the finger
in the center of the bow.)

When the rejected being
suggested early on that the alleged health
of healthy creatures was
in many ways a confidence game, 
the others nodded as if

a nod was better than the wink would be
to a long-dead, well-beaten horse. 
After that, the rejected being could smell
dead horse permeating the meeting room
so often it seemed that

there must be mountains of them
somewhere nearby, invisible
as the rejected being had once been.
They began to speak less of the stench, 
spent meeting time staring

at the press photo
hung so prominently 
behind the head of the table,
where the chair couldn’t see it
at all.

Raptor alone on high:
dull-black speck

against sky
a shade of deep yearning.

Somehow both bird and observer,
I am seeing myself up there:

alone, seeking,
soaring, desperately

not looking straight down
as if seeing myself there

so far away
from what I desire

would initiate
a dive to solid death

for both
seeker and watcher.

Cloud of unknowing:
a hospital bed. A hallway
full of sounds
likely meant for others
or perhaps this time for you,
the voices of better angels
come to give you comfort.

Cloud of unknowing:
the ceiling above, the 
holes in the tiles that likely
lead nowhere except for the One
that opens into a tiny gateway
to the peace that may be waiting
when you leave.

Cloud of unknowing:
when you rise from forgetting
to an awareness of how little
is in your control but you decide
to rest while you can. You will
return to the world soon enough
but for now, you choose
the cloud where all you can do
is wait, and marvel, and heal.

That annoying piano riff that opens
that annoying Coldplay song
is running over and over within me.

I just want it to stop
so instead I can hear
one strong memory
of a living river
I’m not close to
anymore:

Rio Grande
between Santa Fe and Taos;
white water
by the road

where I pulled over thirty years ago
to sit and listen
straining to hear the wind over
ghostly penitente crosses
that might stand
lonely out there still
somewhere on land no one
can get to now because we’ve 
forgotten the way there 
in the cloud of clatter
where we are forced to live.

The lights went out long ago
in the lodges of the penitentes,
and their voices have been
drowned in
noise:

in my head,
that annoying piano riff;

down the street,
the Sunday morning mower
cutting a ridiculous lawn
down to community-approved size;

on a neighbor’s radio,
the allegedly
newsworthy voices
of the insistent dumb;

and in my head,
louder than all the rest,
roaring sorrow and 
invincible ticking down
to a near certainty that
I will never return to
that notch in the side
of the road. 

Some things, I know, 
cannot be saved;

but for there to be
no compensation
for such loss?

Like that piano riff:
ubiquitous; an earworm;
nearly unbearable.

In the unlikely event that I become the center of the universe
I would like it to be known that while I did not ask for it
I embraced the necessity of being the hub around which
this great disheveled wheel can spin as it threatens
to whirl off into the obvious darkness that waits to receive it
when the final day arrives with or without fanfare. Know that

I did not have to do much except sit there as my hair flew
on the undulating wind that rose around me from this whirl
of decay not slowing down but speeding up in a reversal
of what I always thought I knew of entropy, once again
revealing the limits of my understanding and even of my ability
to understand the wide repercussions of what was occurring. Know that

in the unlikely event that I become the center of the universe 
as we know it, I will have been as humble and as much a servant
to the mystery of how things tumble and fall as I am now, when 
the only universe I know keeps me edged out on the fringe of the spin
where I can feel it and see the trails of far away centrality 
that do not include me, have never done so, promise me nothing at all.