Fit

Don't be so impressed with the very large.

One of world's great beauties
is the reckoning of a definite size
of a definite thing,
achieved upon cancellation of infinities.

Love

Love is a cat hair
inserted transversely into my eye,
and I am an allergic mess.

Connectivity

I'm trying to connect to the world on my cell
as we make our way through thick cloud cover
at 400 knots.

The geometer behind me computes our time of arrival,
while you sit by my side,
seeking the few visible stars on the ground,
clawing my wrist with your moist left hand.

Eggshell

The rigidity of this love's container
begs, for the common poet, whether love can or should be contained
(the answer is yes).
But its size is another matter entirely.

The smallness of this love,
and the encapsulating stricture that beats it back,
are manifestly unfair,
necessary perhaps, but also a menace.

Sanguine

Sometimes a hatred grows
in and around and toward me,
thickening the air and my blood,
to slow the pace of life.

The revulsion lingers, and
I languish,
until by some miracle of angular momentum
the hatred transforms into a plan of action
and I imagine guns, ropes, pills,
most of all blades of every kind:
kitchen knives,
straight razors,
cold, surgical steel
swiped like a credit card across the carotid artery
in a swift, practiced flash.

Details multiply, terrify, astonish.
But do they also liberate me
from that thickened air, from
that hot revulsion in my blood?

Plotting and planning are an indication of
life.

Orbits

but what I heard was
"Our love is an orbit."
How odd that sounded to me --
just who is orbiting whom?

I didn't know at the time about Pluto and Charon,
locked, one another, in thrall for eternity,
dancing around a common center
within neither and commanding both.

The loss of Voyager 1

In 1977 we named a probe Voyager 1
and launched it into space,
outward,
toward Jupiter.
That was the year I was born.

On board were magnetometers,
spectrometers,
a record of humanity's achievements,
the music of Mozart and Beethoven,
a note from Jimmy Carter.

A child then,
I saw the launch as unshakably hopeful
and watched as
Voyager 1 transmitted from the gas giants
and was slingshotted outward,
toward the stars.

Today, as voyager finally reaches
outside the influence
of our sun,
it will meet a darkness
that might as well be eternal:
in forty thousand years,
long after its reactor has stopped,
it can finally outdistance
the closest star in the firmament.

An adult now,
I find myself more and more looking
inward,
toward a self that opens with
the seeming infinitude of space.
Perhaps it only seems that way.

One day,
soon enough in the scheme of things,
Voyager 1 will be reencountered
by some progeny of ours --
not as an instrument of exploration,
but as a cultural artifact --
and the contents of that golden record
will be the subject of seminars
on our selves.