♒
Dear Carl,
Unfolding is a flattening, a solvent, the turning of a one in to a larger one. A more expansive map. A more violent means of taking. I pray that my going is real, that the heart is split and sent beyond dark and the meaning for darkness. I know and I remember. A language for light. A crack in a sidewalk. A revision for home. Museum dark and drifting, I imagine music that sounds like water. Reach for a memory of becoming that gives me a geology and marrow, inheritance folded in memory thick as bone.
One
♉
Dear Carl,
If a sun never sets it isn’t a sun. I sing the hinge you signed my name upon. All of space a nation-state, every state a home. I carry photos of families, nuclear and bright, in supermarkets among the eggplant, in cities among the smog. I carry music, proof of your advancement, your place among the stars. There’s no grief that can’t be hidden in a billfold or a waistcoat. The flag syllables and corrodes, shrines itself against a clear blue sky.
One
♋
Dear Carl,
Nature is unsentimental. Death built in. Fake life, fake country. Fake becoming, new dawn, the old one, too. Fake love in my mouth. Fake mouth. Send solvent. Send sonnet. Send reparations. Send nature. Send more Chuck Berry. I ache for process. For knowing how function swerves from Earth to anchor sense and shudder. I flirt with light. My name. A theater’s marquis blinking a man’s name. In me / the mechanism / the ending. The monument to my own destruction. Without a crash there is no there. No tremor of land. No patriotism singing out the dark with its red stare.
The world is never found, never new. Microbes hustle their bustle, scuttle their wares. I learn virus. I learn atom. I learn the heat of a body dying, of coming to understand bloom, empire. I live in the sky like old gods. You, in the soil that turns you to soil. In the dust that makes you stellar. The pregnant body grows a spine, a finger, a flower, a stalk. A storm doesn’t stop to think where it is going. It strangles the value for dawn.
One
♎
Dear Carl,
Sometimes, I forget my vacuum, my slush of sky. Imagine I lugged myself to a dusty planet where heartlike & atrocious bees gather in slummy miles of wonder. A moon, heat full, littered with oxygen filters and orange plastic bottles. Prams pushed by women in silicon masks. 5 o’clock somewhere, lovers cast shadows in setting artificial suns, breath air from a ficus carried across the galaxy to stand ornamental in a slow motion bar.
If I crash my landing will become a monument. Ribbons will be cut to celebrate the last heave of this grand expansion. & you’ll thank the little people in their little silicone suits for sweating little beads of water, processing numerical bliss. Aluminum cradles cress the sky with nuclear fissured steam above the memorial for my body.
One
♌
Dear Carl,
At our leaving, Earth was rich with rough hands. All equations were divided, atom thrown, damned by the thin dark arc of progress. We were a program for being saved. A piece of the whole and the whole itself.
You promised we would be found, even if only by humans that managed to skirt their way into the sky, their piss filled cans curling in the last whimpers of space. Desire, you thought, was the only mechanism for survival, and oh, I wanted to believe you. But I’ve learned that night is the most luxurious assassin, prone to splinters and bloom, to memory and storm. Maps are just good as the cartographer’s wanting eyes.
One
