Blueshift
In another life I’m a cosmologist, lungs snow-
shot with chalk dust, an exile from origins
eyeing the end, when sigma’s jaws close
on quintessence or open, infinitely. Consider
Poincaré recurrence: I would be a harp assembling
myelf in Andromeda’s outmost reaches, neck
and body joined in a glass casket, an open lattice
thin as hammered silver gilding petals. I’d string
myself so taut a single particle-wave grazing by
would pluck me and send my trill back to you,
evergreen among evergreens, braiding
your ghostly hair into a sensible rope before
you set out for the seed vault, antediluvian
ledger of possibility. You decide what life’s
worth saving, what matters of matter,
I quipped. But you didn’t grin—you pressed
something cold and white between our palms:
Trillium grandiflorum. Outside snow tumbles
over sophomores and starlings, the earth attracts it,
wants it back like a lover, and there’s a grand stack
of journals covering your side of the bed.
Restless, I slip out into tarnished dark,
I walk deeper and deeper into a future,
into blueberry fields, a red-leaf symphony
reflecting old starlight’s spectral ice. Between us
space expands. Cold sweeps the skies open.
Vanishing, I’m bound for your pines. Please,
teach me how to gaze back, this time.
