34 Neruda Falls
35 Old Books
39 From a Ridge on Figueroa Mountain
Particles
The reason you do not clearly understand
the time-being
is that you think of time only as passing.
DŌGEN, AD 1240
We must endure our thoughts all night, until
The bright obvious stands motionless in cold.
WALLACE STEVENS, 1946
Winter solstice — the sun
stopped for a moment —
can you feel its light stretching —
as it shrugs off its migration
and turns back north toward the pole?
On this rock, just the right
distance from the nearest star,
sheltered by Jupiter and kept in season
by the steadying moon,
being moves through my body
like clouds, arriving in one shape,
drifting off as another.
I don’t remember being born,
only the great dog
whose fur I clung to
before the first day of school.
Memory accounts
for space, not time.
It records the quality and angle
of light, the keen, metallic scent of wind
through porch screens — the wailing
as it rises — the warmth and texture of air —
the weather and sometimes
whether or not it was a Tuesday,
but never how long it lasted — or
how many years ago — only
how it felt — alone in that moment.
And the sound of waves breaking.
We see time past as Euclidian — moments
of solitude with no date affixed —
long afternoons of childhood in no time at all,
when it first occurred that you were seven,
without knowing that,
because of the moment — now in memory —
you will always be seven in that place.
Our solitude — being alone
with the one you knew there —
our loneliness — being there
without him.
Two billion seconds of life
now, on a planet only
four and a half billion years
old — and every atom on loan
to it much older than that.
In the beginning, all that was
was too hot for atoms — too tightly
packed to let go of its light —
as if the universe
had come out the other side of a black hole —
heading back to where it began
over ungraspable distance
right now — and not at all
far from home.
Every creation story I know
comes out of the dark —
the brune garden in which light blooms.
Dark matter pulling chaotic
energy apart — breaking the prison
of its own concentration —
giving it space to be a wave.
The master equation
of the Standard Model of particle physics
accounts for everything
except gravity — and gravity
accounts for everything —
irresistible center of the spheres
and stars, on and among which
we go on — curving our
straight course — as it draws
the