I’ve heard it said that hearsay
isn’t admissible in trying to justify one’s life.
But my mother always said she’d heard otherwise,
and cited one or two old wives’ tales to that very point.
She was, in her way, simply trying to bequeath me
the certainty of truth. But truth has no certainty.
And now we’re told all matter, dark or otherwise,
is composed of nano-sized strings of vibrating energy.
Which we’re also told is a theory,
and therefore still refutable.
Though at season’s first frost, I’ve been known to stand
in my backyard naked but for the essentials
and feel myself trembling as if I’d proven some proof—
a moment strung with its own certitude
even as the rest of my life lay
in the misty realm of the theoretical,
a tapestry of memory frayed down to the fragments
of the merely possible.
Which is a rather chilling way to look at one’s life.
And may very well explain all the shivering we do.
How we live life as if sometimes unproven;
but then, at other times, as if perfectly true.
I once had an idea no larger
than a mote
but it was at a time when I didn’t want
to touch the world
even though the leaves clicked their crisp language
and winter opened its first chronicle of light
stars like percussive bits of shrapnel
shredding the night sky.
While in my house, the rising heat played
with the dust, set it shambling across the room
a cotillion of particles dancing to a mute tune
and among the shyest the heat had set afloat
an idea I once had, no larger than a mote.
Some believe that somewhere out there,
far from near, light years from here,
out there among the two hundred billion stars
of this, our galaxy; among the two hundred
billion galaxies of this, our universe;
each of these galaxies with their
two hundred billion, six hundred billion,
their trillion stars; that yes, yes, out there
assuredly this or that life form, this or that
intelligence, malevolence, beneficence, or
something of single-celled consistence
must exist.
And of all this I’ve sometimes sat and wondered,
and as often wondered how in all of this, in the
multiplicities of dancing possibilities, in the likelihood
of probabilities, that I somehow feel no wonder at all.
What if…what if I wrote a poem
not of this moment, nor of a moment
past, nor future.
What if I wrote a poem where a person,
yet unborn, would not need to pause
to ask herself, What is this thing
called ‘coal’?
Yet unborn, pausing to ask, What is this quality
he calls ‘unmerciful’?
Or if from an age past, to wonder at the phrase
mutually assured destruction. Or, trend lines.
As in, trend lines trending toward
oceanic rising; which, if you consider,
is the same as mutually assured destruction.
Or the word mass, how a medieval priest
would think of the church liturgy, while
the yet-to-be-born might think of the weight
contained in the nucleus of an atom.
And therefore how curious they each might find it—
the word mass followed by the word shooting.
And what is a priest to do with the illuminated manuscript
That is the screen of a handheld device?
And what is our futurist to do with the quaint memory
Of when once we had hands? Hands that held other hands.
So again, what if I wrote a poem
Not of any given moment, but of a moment
Without moment? What words
Would I then use? What if there is no given moment
To give words to? A gift to give, forever ungiven?
At speed that approaches that of light,
time, whatever it is, nearly stops.
The simple batting of an eyelash
that will take ten thousand years to reach you.
And though long gone, the love that arrives
arrives coquettishly new.
