The apogee
of Orion's Belt
the western-most hitch
for his dark pants
is a double star, actually
A and B: bright blue giants
twin suns circling
every five days
each 3 billion years old
and yet still younger
than our own star
born as our own earth
broke apart its supercontinent
first formed its magnetic field
whose light took
916 years to arrive
left as Henry I
was crowned in England
the Crusades raged
Héloïse was born
Abélard's destiny was set
and a picture
of the twin blue suns of Mintaka
went forth across the universe
and was received by my eyes
almost a thousand years later
just as I was thinking about the important things
I had to do today.
First published in The Scarlet Leaf Review, December 2016
Once, 2 black holes
succumbed
to the unstoppable pull
of their own mass
circling like lovers
rounding for eons
before collapsing
into one.
What Einstein knew
is that bodies
of such mass
cannot come together
without consequence—
that there is a warping
a violence to time
and to space
in the consummation,
releasing the energy
of every star
in the cosmos
as a wave
of gravity itself
sent, rippling, across
the fabric of the universe
but slowly
fading also
until reaching us
millions of galaxies
and one billion
years later as a wave
so minute it required
1,000 scientists
pressing their ears
to an antennae
of pure vacuums
lasers and precision optics
two miles long
to hear
the tiniest, little
ping.
What Einstein knew
has been my experience, too.
We, these bodies
of heft and light,
we rarely fuse together
or pull apart
without consequence
without some violence
to time and space
though the wave
may dissipate
across miles and years
be hard to detect
with the grossness
of our usual optics
and interference
to our antennae
too often
I am at the mercy yet
of the long ago
the whispered signals
the things not said
I am stretched
by the hidden waves
the ripples of ancient
collisions shake me still.
First published in Firefly Magazine, March 2016
Lemonwhite and smudged
by ocean haze
I stumble upon
a huge softball moon
suspended above
the twilit hillside.
Not the cold, bright
golfball moon
sailing through
the high dark sky
but its bigger, easier
laughing cousin
full as my moonshining
eyes as my twilit heart.
Which they say is a lie
an inflationary trick
played on my wanting mind
when the round moon
hangs just above
the lip of some horizon—
and which I can test
by holding up to it
an object of reference,
a dime from my pocket,
to see that, really,
the broad, desirous low moon
and the thin, austere high moon
are exactly the same size.
But why should I believe that?
Does my own size not change—
though never at all
compared to the dime
in your pocket?
Don't I grow
from thin to bursting
to equanimity to tears
within a single day,
without ever changing
the dimensions of my skin?
Don't you?
Leave your dime
in your pocket,
we have enough
objects of reference
and no need to test
the fullness of our hearts.
First published in The Scarlet Leaf Review, December 2016
Dark skies aren't dark
starlight, it turns out, is a thing
not the smattering of white pinpricks
strong enough to punch through
our hungrily crafted cages of light
but the ever deepening depth of field
uncountable suns, finely fading
into another with every stronger lens
filling the tree-free corners
of the blueblack night.
I'm pleased to report to the chalk-dusted blazers
the eminently tenured committees
that I have discovered this
and that my experiment is repeatable, thusly:
First, you must remove yourself
to the still, the dark
the inconveniently faraway places
the greater the chance
of happening upon a bear, a cougar
the more likely you're doing it right.
Next, build a fire, roaring
toast marshmallows if you'd like
complement its admirable heat
absorb the smoke into your bones
slowly sip its light as your fuel and energy wane
gradually invite the darkness in over your shoulders
lean closer into the pulsing coals
begin to study the syntax of the shadows
the relative qualities of the darkness
the shuffling soundtrack of the night.
Finally, look up, and you will find yourself
pulled upward, the fire and you
into the cosmos
into the miraculous slash of our galaxy
those pastures of uncountable suns
look at your hands
illuminated by starlight
see them as the pharaohs did
as the shepherds counting their gods.
Observe the particular shade of your loss.
How simple it turns out to be to see by starlight
how difficult we make it
to hear the stars that tell stories
to walk the god-haunted halls.
Dark skies aren't dark at all.
Somewhere beyond the cages of light
slowly fading coals
are ever giving way to shadows
directing someone up to endlessness
are lighting hands forever.
sail across the ocean tops.
[A cosmopolitan genus
of free-floating hydrozoans
that live on the surface
of the open ocean.]
Blue jellied discs,
sometimes blown aground,
scattered across
morning beaches,
astride the tides
of sliding sea foam.
[Velella velella, small
Cnidaria commonly
known by the names
sea raft, by-the-wind sailor,
purple sail, little sail,
or simply Velella.]
We have named you
Velella velella.
We have named you
By-the-wind-sailor.
We have named you
Cnidaria,
Hydrozoan,
Anthomedusae,
Porpitidae,
Velella. We have named
your blue jellied bodies
your sea-worthy sails,
rigged on ridged backs.
This is how
we name things, twice.
One name in wonder,
By-the-wind-sailor.
Another so as to classify,
so as not to wonder,
Velella velella cnidaria hydrozoan,
about the whether
of blue jellied souls.
[Specialized predatory
gastropod mollusks
prey on these cnidarians.
Such predators
include nudibranchs (sea slugs)
in the genus Glaucus
and purple snails
in the genus Janthina.]
Like so, we have also
named the trees.
Plantae,
Embryophyte,
Sempervirens.
Coastal Redwood.
Trees, who even
as they sway silently
in the breeze, call
out to each other
through tubes
of underground fungi,
push chemical calls
through mushrooms:
Fire. Beetles. Axes.
Protect yourself,
embitter your bark,
change your nature,
draw in your water.
It took millenia
to begin to decode
the language trees speak,
and so what
can we really hope
to understand
about you, Velella?
The how of knowing?
The chemical what
of speaking?
The fear of sea slugs.
The creeping stomachs
of purple snails.
[These small Cnidaria
are part of a specialized
ocean surface community.
There is only one
known species,
Velella velella,
in the genus.]
What can we know
except about your proteins,
about the jellied flat disc of you,
about how we see you sail
across the ocean tops.
Nothing, except that we,
too, like you,
fellow Animalia,
are alone now
in our genus.
We, Homo sapien,
a specialized and cosmopolitan
surface community.
We, Animalia,
Chordata,
Mammalia,
Primate,
Hominid.
Homo
sapien.
'Wise.'
Big-brained bipeds
who tell ourselves lies
to sleep at night,
and write poetry,
and classify into kingdoms,
and fear creeping stomachs,
and cannot reconcile
the entanglements
of our quantum hearts
with the relativity
of our time bound bodies,
and never knew
that trees speak,
and so should
by now know
that we yet
[know]
nothing
of the universe,
or of you, Velella velella.
[We are all
by the wind sailors.]
First published in Verse-Virtual, May 2017
Late summer, and a pod of
humpback whales made a stopover
in the little bay near our home.
For weeks we all lingered at its seams,
the crumbling bluffs, the break wall, the pungent
kelp-strewn beach, to point and watch,
thrilled by the sight of glistening
backs arcing, split seconds of small dorsals
slicing the surface, the little blow
of salty spray. And as a reward
for the very patient, for those willing
to tirelessly scan the gunmetal waves,
the black, barnacled, vast wedge
of a head, bursting upward through
a foamy array of startled seabirds
gathered to nab a bit of that same bloom
of sardines, anchovies, shrimp, squid,
driven closer to shore by our warming seas.
Soon they will move onward, continue
their hungry crawl down the coast from
well-stocked Alaskan summer homes
to the warm, winter love nests of Mexico,
and we will be left, shaking our heads
fondly at our departed guests.
Telling stories of their antics, smiling at
their memory—but secretly glad they left
before familiarity soured our wonder.
Knowing, deep inside,
the dark heart of our history
with giant gentle things,
the whales, the elephants, the ancient rising redwoods,
how we cannot seem to help but destroy them,
to mine their grandeur for mundanity,
lamp oil, billiard balls, decking,
the alchemy of gold into lead.
How sad is our relationship to immensity.
First Published in the anthology, Carry the Light, May 2016