You are made of dust and ice
–
The same stuff I am, a
little colder,
A little looser –
Smears of color: green and
gold.
I step back a hundred
light-years
And our anatomies shift:
You are a figurehead
With no ship, a rising-eagle
nebula,
Cutting through nothingness
And leaving creation in its
wake;
I am a speck of dust.
A baleful star’s energy extinguished
you
With argon waves and
radioactive fire
Six thousand years ago. Hurtling
Forward, it erased your
unfinished
face, a cradle of newborn
stars.
Traces of dust and ice too
loose, too bright
Swirl calmly, detachédly.
We will see proof in a
thousand years –
Light carrying ancient
images of your destruction
Will reach me, disperséd dust.
Perhaps in five hundred
years
In some far corner of the
cosmos,
Light bearing my image
Will collide with yours.
We will see each other then,
Translated from dust and ice
to
Bodies of light.
World-making
I cannot compose you a
fruitcake,
But I can orchestrate a
cento,
Mouthing others’ words the
way
I wish they would mouth me.
You are looking outward at
that which
In ten thousand years will
be dry and dead.
There are so many dead, and I
would have to tell
How dirt mottles the rocks.
'Tis good—the looking back
on Grief—but
I wish that I had spoken
only of it all.
This cento takes lines from Flannery O’Connor, Sylvia Plath, Rainer Maria Rilke, Gary Snyder, Pablo Neruda, Emily Dickinson, and Gertrude Stein.