Forty of Fifty

A universe lived and died within my dreams
and my small life circumscribed in life kept cycling
round my heart.

It isn't much: eighty years packed and unpacked in a skin.
You'd think those years would hang loose, emptying and wrinkled
as their casing—shallowly bulging the lumpen hours of sleep,
mechanical duties rotely completed, duties ignored in hunkered pastimes.
You'd think my years were slippage. They were not.

No matter how old I seemed to get, a universe lived in my dreams
where life spiraled and stretched differently. It butterflied outward in
choice after choice. Cumulative remembrance colored it, powdercoated its undercarriage
and vast, curving wings—life flew wrapping itself on reality, pollinating
the dull, overlooked grasses that nourish so many miniscule creatures
with heartbeats, daily twitchings and munchings, reproductive eruptions.

In that universe neither kindness nor cruelty mattered.
Only keeping one's eyes open mattered, and the absence of anger
was like a choir's hushed intake before singing, like a clean kitchen,
empty in the morning. Everything echoed there, vision and scent,
light and thought, and the permeable universe wore its milliseconds like
individual stains. And beauty was not a false motive there
nor the constituent of lies. Beauty was income, and rest, and loyalty,
a surface one shivered to touch, and life horizoned endlessly
from that molecule. And all living things made their choices.
We savored consequence there.

You'd think I would grieve when the universe died. But
it wasn't my life. A human is a universe inside an insignificance—
the paradox blooms and leaves no breath for solitary perfections.
How crowded you are against me, boiling with universe—
tell me what you see there! My starveling curiosity has the shape of a world gone,
and I crave humans' dirtiness and silly plans and sacred inarticulacies before I stop.
For life is swift and calculates us into its immersing arc, and I would pack
your world in me. Take my hand across the table; let me smile into your wounds
and hear of your small, fertile life, how it is circumscribed in life,
how it keeps cycling
round your heart.


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