This universe is too wide for us:
A beautiful pair of shoes that your toes don’t reach to the end of.
Mum says you’ll grow into them. Puts them into the cupboard for later,
and you’re left looking up at the box on the top shelf
Get bored, and go towards the kitchen, looking for food.
The night is too long for us.
Enough minutes to share our hearts and all our secrets, with all the
tender things that make us lie awake, far apart on a King mattress.
You’re left staring at the wall, the inside of your eyelids,
the blossoming patterns of the hypnagogia:
the oncoming tunnel of sweet, self-populated worlds.
The kiss is too much for us,
Too much, and untranslatable. Shapes turn in on themselves,
Music sweeps somewhere over your shoulder, your mind drifts;
Can only bear the slightest touch. The reminder. The revelation.
The half-vision. If God came and sat with you,
You’d be thinking about tomorrow evening, who you’re going to tell,
Something somewhere that you’d forgotten.
Above our heads spins Outer Space,
The widest numbers separating the planets, the heavy things.
I take your hand, compressing the distance between our nerves, still;
The universe of atoms that hold every part of you from every other.
I send a message into the black, and wait.
I sit by the edge of the ocean, graphite-coloured waves softening my toes.
A thousand years later I learn how to build an antennae:
Salt crystal upon silicate from the trillions rolling under the place I sit.
I point my metal finger to the sky:
The one-digit catch, the voice my life was made to perceive,
heliumbariumlithium3.1416orbitorbitorbit, firefirefirefire-fire fire White FIRE!
Nice poem. I like the image of the graphite-coloured sea. The whole concept of the universe being too large is lovely; we appreciate what we can in diminutive chunks. Thanks for sharing this.
Above our heads spins Outer Space,
The widest numbers separating the planets, the heavy things.
I take your hand, compressing the distance between our nerves, still;
The universe of atoms that hold every part of you from every other.
I send a message into the black, and wait.
I love this image. From the universe, down to the space between the atoms, compressed when we touch…sending our messages into the black and waiting….peace…be still. Beautiful.
You’re speaking my language here. Thank you for showing the beauty and eloquence that is the scientific method. Lovely poem.
Beautiful. So moving. Thank you.
Andy, this leaves me with the feeling that proximity is an illusion. Time and progress a fiction. And yet we hope for more and are compelled to believe. Because we have love to give. Thanks.
The poem suggests to me the paradox that, as you say Matt, all proximity is an illusion. Yet, if time and proximity seem so great at times that we can’t bridge them, we only need to look to the stars, where all the elements have their birth and rejoining: where our bodies and fantasies came from, and where they will go: to shine back through ‘the immensity of space’.
I liked this. The last line in particular reminded me of Pascal writing down his a mystical experience which he carried with him the rest of his life, sewed inside his coat lining:
“From about half-past ten in the evening until about half-past twelve . . . FIRE . . . God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob, and not of the philosophers and savants. Certitude. Certitude. Feeling. Joy. Peace.”
I’m not sure what Pascal saw or experienced. Perhaps some kind of vision, or perhaps like the psalmist, just the night sky was sufficient, as it was for you. Thanks for posting.