Cities and suburbs, real and imaginary.

Wednesday, June 28, 2017

Sestina #1


Braced against the skin of this watery rock
Every single person anybody knows their name
Is here, some apartment, some crowded room
Below our feet all the ground we'll ever hold
All that lives, and all that dies, wrapped in space
Endless space, and swirling suns and galaxies

I send my love to sing the galaxies
The rolling derbies of steel upon the rock
Where new kingdoms will carry our name
Where children of our love will make room
For more children, where the life holds
Warm and clean shelter, fill up this space

When you merely study this dark and space
You will not see just the empty glow of galaxies
Where no signs of life cling to ice and rock
You'll paint mythologies upon the stones by name
Therein pushing history and dreams to make room
For human bodies to rise into the dark and hold

This seedling I carry to our orchard, I hold
so close into my chest, the space
between the lemon tree and the galaxies
Is shaped like the absence of a rock
The absence of a history, of a name
And I stand between these two places, all room

I plant my love and my tree where there's room
For roots to reach and hands to touch and hold
We'll carry all these living things into space
And bring the wild earth to the galaxies
Where seedlings and insects dig into rocks
And make new islands, become new things, new names

I send my love to you signed by name
Will you let me sweetly into your room
Where, together, we may have and hold
And bathe our skin in dappled starlight space
above us sinking into our skin, the light of galaxies
Calling to our children down to our little rock

The universe in a conch shell, names in chaos held in rock
Where geologic time holds deep in our quiet bedroom
The skin of us, the tiniest galaxies of us, to fill all space

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