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