Two Poems
Courtesy of the author.
A Moderate Space
it’s sunny,
the gravel’s hot
& shifting beneath my feet.
I have the afternoon off—
a free day, one may call it—
& I’m making my way
to a CVS,
more out of necessity
than anything else,
to obtain a supply of small white pills
I’m told will save my psyche.
I don’t go to drugstores happily;
I’ve waited until the last minute,
again—unlike most other things
in my life, the timeliness of my own
stabilization has never been a priority
of mine, & I have to hitch a ride
with two people who greatly dislike
me at present, & our superior,
whose feelings are stringently neutral.
they are headed to the farmers’ market,
& I am requesting a stop at CVS.
as I am presently living on a commune—
in practice, though not in name—
the fluorescent lights & moldy carpeting
of my childhood are a shock
to the system, but I have been here
before, & it is easy.
as I wait in line,
as my prescription is sent
to a Walgreens on the corner of Home,
as I wait again until it is re-sent all the way here,
as the others wait impatiently
in the valleys between the meticulously-labelled
aisles, wading in the rivers of the pharmacist’s sarcasm,
there is a softening, almost
an erosion
of the walls of the pharmacy,
the bricks of the structure
& of my own structure, giving way
to some kind of moderate space.
we listen to Shakira
on the way back; on some old CD,
whose dusty cover tells me nobody has touched it
in years, whose songs none of us know,
but we all try to sing anyway.
Courtesy of the author.
The Art of Paying Attention
the other day, a friend sent me an article
complete with pictures of
a star—as far from the center of its galaxy
as we are from the center of our own—
that lost its battle with gravity,
that flowed into a solar stream, then was
sucked into the billion-solar-mass black hole
at the center of the galaxy,
lost to light. astronomers recorded this,
meticulously, with ever-present and ever-
evolving technology, but the fact remains
that at the center of most galaxies
there is a black hole, where space is curved
and time grinds to a halt and matter
is transformed into something unrecognizable.
I'm starting to think such a death
is neither literally nor metaphorically
far off. the universe tends towards entropy,
and I hardly know how I ended up as I am,
regardless of the hours I've spent
birthing the story up from my gut.
the universe tends towards entropy,
and whenever I think I'm reaching a summit,
I end up here—back at the base
of the mountain, lost and cold and alone,
with shaky footing, wondering if all there is
a precipice, two feet from hurtling
towards the black hole at the center
of my universe. the universe tends towards entropy,
and we are always this far from chaos;
ten light-years, a hair's breadth.
this afternoon, I went out to the garden
for some lettuce, and it was smooth, like
the pond's surface just a few yards away.
I bent down to snip a leaf, and the whole plant
shook, his bed of compatriots flush for yards
down the row. I began tending to the lettuce
as another task to manifest a busy day,
but the wind as it shimmied through the leaves
would blow me to a halt, stop and whisper:
we are made most of the water
from where we come, such is the same with lettuce;
beads of moisture rain from my hose
(an extension of my right hand), coming to rest
in the divets of each leaf, bending southward
towards the water table under the soil,
then rushing upwards from outposts
deep in the earth, building a waterway
with each stalk a tributary, every leaf
a watershed. though the universe still tends
towards entropy, the balance is hung
such that the galaxy holds the sun
and the sun holds the Earth
and the Earth holds the clouds that rain down
on the lettuce that flows up from the Earth
in an ever-continuing cycle:
time moves in ellipses, like the movement
of the stars, ever-circling
back to before, and forward to after.
time is not a string pulled taut, but a coil;
it endlessly circles back to remind myself
that I am, I am, I am.