Cosmos: A Poem

The Language of Space and Time

64 THE LANGUAGE OF SPACE AND TIME I The counterpane now is only space—an extent in light. Once, it encoded a town and belief, when grass spread wide its uttering tongues below children. A skyline on the western horizon seemed cut out of paper. Huge heads of oaks, those elders, nodded over the low roof-angles and the wooden bodies below, alive with shouts and groans, the hopes and mournings. The attics, seen from inside, held rafters devoutly skyward, like Hands in Prayer. Atmospheres spoke over these humid lawns, echoing cries between houses at evening—lightning bugs winking, enlarging separation, gathering in darkness— while cooking, that the children smelled from outside the yellowing windows, bound their tastes to this earth with more gravity—submerged them in feeling, their words soft-edged, blurring the consonants, inflecting bedtime whispers with a particular belonging. So that Earth may speak of space, it has brewed these rounded-off, gut-urged surges of breath, with tastes of long-cooked meat, night in the nostrils. II Over the town now shadowed on the counterpane, lightning flashes. As the storm gathers in upon the hurried inhabitants, rain in stringent lines splashes their faces, like the slight weight of rays from far stars. They look up, and back, tears of recognition streaming from their eyes. 65 They have come so far, materialized on this stage that is the same for everyone, and different. This possible surface lifts from the Earth and recedes into time. I behold it departing with a rending like the soul tearing loose from my body. And in that moment I am consoled: by knowing what love is possible, how so much expands with the new-born light, in morning, and how this whiteness deepens, rich with a thousand kisses, shadowed by this land with its snake-stealthy river, the air passing under a bridge, enlarged within the arms and breasts of a lover, along the lone road at nightfall, in moth-lifting evening. This remembered fabric, like a counterpane folded and re-folded between a mother and daughter, is the membrane of space and time— surface of love, experience of place on Earth—a town, somewhere to exist again. ...