M0R1BUND

A woman falls into a black hole and asks the dead sun if her girlfriend remembers her

December 1, 2020

I lose the sun overhead.

Meanwhile the vultures.
Meanwhile the torches in the black night write the name of god
like a child tracing her mother’s handwriting.
Meanwhile the dogs of war file through a field
and they break rank only to step around a dry riverbed.

Out beyond time it is hard to imagine our mother the sun.
I ask her anyway:
Do you hear them?
Do you close your eye on the dying day and turn away?

I imagine then unbroken sun
Unblinking eye, rank and file over the sky
again and again.
If you are a memory of light, how would, then,
you remember even the night?

The tunneling microscopes in the university lab
allow us to image individual atoms.
Does a photograph of an atom capture its likeness
if only its absence can be felt?

Meanwhile there are quarks.
Meanwhile there are black holes in which the future opens infinitely before you
and your past is annihilated.
Meanwhile gas burns in an imagined sun.

Two lovers complicit in the death of a comet

December 5, 2020

Beyond the moon there are mesquite trees
whose boughs hold the sun as fat drops of monsoon rain
There are pronghorn that leap through time
like jumping stones in a creek

Through Titan you and I are two different places on a map
Near and far, inhale, exhale, high tide and low
Saturn and Jupiter, holding the world in confidence.
Even the far, sightless stars share gravity with you
and you with them
and you with me

Yes, beyond the moon there is still gravity
still a monarch’s wingbeats tug at you
still we cry out in the soundless night
as a passing comet burns up in Earth’s arms and hardly blinks
still we feel
and are felt

I have seen mockingbirds pluck and eat planets like soft berries
ciliates with pulsing vacuoles made of distant suns
There is a place where space and time switched places
partners in the cosmic dance, playfully wearing one another’s habit

Today I watched the ocean rise instead of the sun
and I thought of you.
Will you meet me there
beyond the moon?