V E R S E and I M A G E

I wonder as I display the face

of Enceladus, the Saturnalian moon,

to students pecking on cell phones.

Their saltwater brains

enmeshed in everything

but this moon dressed

in bright fresh eruptions

of sow fall, pockmarked

craters, and frozen blue

rivers of tears.

It is January, my season

for venting and remembering –

the snow packed mountain

road which winded up

to the Flat Rock Church

that my father rebuilt,

post and beam. Every nail

hand-hammered,

every cement block place

and trialed with his patience

in finding God in hard work.

I want to tell the class

that humans are the only

species known to cry

from emotion.

Instead, I get locked

inside my mind’s

digital inventory –

to see a wooden pin

box engraved

with his name next

to the pulpit, wreathed

with baby’s breath, steam

and smoke escapes every seam.

from Demise of Pangaea, Main Street Rag Publishing, Charlotte NC, © 2024

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Here’s how science works: observation – hypothesis – test – revise – test again – etc. Even gravity, which so far has bruised me every single time I’ve fallen, has chinks in its unassailable wall of theory. Revise – test – revise again. Science is less about nailing down and more about thrusting open.

What would happen if a scientist were to investigate love? A review of the literature would be in order, but the theories of Masters & Johnson and the Kinsey Report are to love as Newton is to Heisenberg. Perhaps the poetry of love would be more helpful, but wouldn’t that be like trying to map the cosmos without a standard candle, no reference point from which all other distances can be calculated? Uncertainty indeed!

And yet poets just can’t quit writing love poems. (And death poems. I argue that without an awareness of mortality there would be no poets and no poems at all. Perhaps knowing that all of this that is me will one day cease makes me even more desperate for love.) How would a science of love work? Is it a two body problem? Where each body’s mass and velocity keep changing and changing without pattern or predictability? A recipe for crashing or flying apart. Or, on some more beneficent cosmos, might each body practice its love science – observe, contemplate, revise – and at least on some days experience a stable orbit?

Clearly the chance for a unified theory of love is pretty slim. And yet, in the cold and darkness of space, how can we not be drawn to warmth and light? Each love poem is another data point. Each fond glance is a photon arriving from the void. I will allow myself to be encouraged and not afraid of infinite complexity in this expanding universe.

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The doctor examines

every inch of me, every defect

I’ve collected on this skin.

When she gets to my breasts

she sees it –

a spoonful of jam dropped

by mother at birth,

beacon of wonder or disgust.

All my life I”ve wanted it gone.

I lied about it like a bad tattoo.

The doctor measures,

collects data on her notepad –

radius and diameter,

sketches its blurred perimeter.

Her eyes are cosmic cameras

lit even now by the big bang

of my birth. They rove the dried

alluvium of hips, descend

into the canyon of my C-section.

She zeroes in with calipers

to the belt’s middle more – my Alnilam.

Without warning,

she scoops it out,

as if it were a black hole

and would consume me

atom by atom.

This is when I am certain

that I love my mark of Cain –

imagine the nebula

going into a lover’s mouth.

Its sweetness, red

texture like cotton candy,

its wholesome intention

swelling the brain.

from Demise of Pangaea, Main Street Rag Publishing, Charlotte NC, © 2024

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I recall my one conversation with Claudine Moreau some twenty years ago, learning she teaches physics and astronomy at Elon University, and saying to myself, “Hell, Yes!” Poetry is required to grasp modern physics; physics requires a poet to convey it. A beautiful equation is a crystal of metaphor; reality is no click of billiard balls but a cloud of imaginings. Every decade or two I re-read The Dancing Wu Li Masters to marinate myself again in what cannot be touched but only felt.

Like these poems. Demise of Pangaea – Moreau’s lines contain hard images which one might collect like fragments of iron in permafrost after a meteorite explodes, but the collection, the whole, is the flash and steam and momentary brilliance of matter and atmosphere colliding. Halfway through the book I grumbled, “These are not at all chronological. How am I to connect these poems and make them make sense?” Exactly, exactly. Whose life makes any sense at all as it unspools? Contemplating my life is like looking through a telescope – the moments that seem separated by only a fraction of an arc-second are actually years apart, light-years distant. These poems are raisins in a pudding: as it cooks and expands, they separate so that when we open it, each sweet, pungent moment stands out by itself. Galaxies in an expanding universe.

And so I return to the title poem for my reference point, my Alnilam in the center of Orion’s belt. Once the earth was whole, a single land mass, and seemed surely destined to remain so forever. But deep forces and dark machines work on us and our desires, and no one can bridge every chasm and rift as the continent splits in two. Hold on to the bright moments. Seek a high point from which you can embrace the Milky Way. Every star burns out, as it must. Fix it in your memory. Perhaps in the glimmer of a star, in a poem about love, you may for a moment forget how heavy / Earth makes all of this.

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Sample additional poems and purchase Demise of Pangaea at Main Street Rag, HERE

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It’s June and the sky never goes dark –

the solstice sun entombing night.

An endless red dusk

seeps like a wound,

bleeds through Oslo’s

barcode skyline.

Harbor fjords become gnomons,

track the day’s slow radioactive decay.

We are in bed, midnight sun exposes

the long ridge between our bodies.

I watch your chest rise,

a hundred tiny moles move outward –

the continents pull apart by slow churn,

some invisible thing rising through rock.

from Demise of Pangaea, Main Street Rag Publishing, Charlotte NC, © 2024

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