Colleen Bazdarich
Dark Matter
I.
There's not much to tell you; We've lost something along the way; a cold-blooded animal; creature of the sea, dweller of deeper water than I've ever tasted. A scepter of light cuts the surface, submerged noise the sound of memory in black and white movies.
There's so much to tell you; a lost something in the way. A warm-blooded animal; carnivorous beast, thicket blacker than conjured in fairy tales. Midnight in Gibraltar, the radiance from Tetouan hid monkeys amid mass dark rock.
I've lost something to tell you; so much we've said along the way. A winged animal; a bird of prey, sky thick sliced by agile bone, a cold I'd forgotten. Swallows in Capistrano return in white veils, numinous as girl faces held in train window glass.
II.
If not for the scent of melon on your breath
If not for the trilling of wires in the spade of
If not for advanced sight and your advancing age
In black and white movies and the stain of wine on your manicured dress and lawn.
Midnight in Marbella we swam the conjugation of Mediterranean and Atlantic under a half-full moon, our robes left on the shore; no light from Ceuta or Malaga or the Puerto; no light at all. You stole a paddle boat, snuck down through the sand at stops and starts as guests of the hotel came in and out of view. Still robed then and dry as the great rock on the corner of the coast; not at all sleepy and sand in between toes; no fog at all in the black sky above the Gibraltar Strait.
III. Unfinished: The Crux
Crux was unknown to the ancient world. Ptolemy drew it as part of Centaur in the original 48 constellations. The Romans called it Thronis Caesaris in honor of emperor Augustus; although Crux is invisible in Italy, it was visible from Alexandria. Another interesting side note is that Crux was last seen in Jerusalem (latitude 31 degrees, 46 minutes, and 45 seconds) about the time that Christ was crucified. -- astronomical.org
Come in, then. There's not much I can offer you.
Heads like heads in a dream -- insoluble, pulpy --
afloat on the water and not looking up
at the stars, which must have been spectacular;
which must have been the wolf Lupus and minor Ursa
and the two compasses Circinus, pieced together
long ago, in a cold year on the Cape of Good Hope.
And then the Crux, the elusive Southern Cross,
singed with a delicate kind of forgetting I've never mastered.
No double or variable stars or deep sky objects but
water mingling about the nobs of our ankles:
That rise at the shin; it's bone but God knows why.
My friend lay perfectly sideways so the curve
of her thigh and the absurd bump of ankle
were all that poked through the water, which was black.
It must have been a half moon, as the white electric lines
like a neon sign tinged the lap of the wave moving past
even before a light from the shore shivered across the surface.
IV. Variable stars
Rocket scientist, you must understand the curve of fingers about the neck, the Betelgeuse energy of 60,000 suns, the hero's elegant quest across a celestial body.
Snow and wind and dark in the Rockies. The body's luckless covet of that which belongs to others, even to those we love, especially to those we love. Years above, the blackest bird atop a many-headed animal; the water snake shaking his scorched crown about the sky.
Space traveler, explain to me the expansion of universe, that vain queen throwing her hair into nothing; gas and fire and star islands stretched along the skin of a balloon.
Then the deep sea and legs trailing behind a stolen boat. We went under water, slowly into the dark; the disappearance barely disturbing the surface; the plastic monster afloat absurdly alone, under the half moon at midnight and the cloudless northern hemisphere.
Stargazer, from cedar ceiling you follow the brutal course of Hercules, dawn littered with brilliant bones of Hera's beasts.
Stargazer, with ice on the windows and the sun spread along the ecliptic, Eastre and Ishtar in white robe about the heavens.
V. November 18, 2001
Dark in my mission window; warbly light from the street.
Above a storm from Cor Leonis, set afire
when Temple Tuttle hurled itself toward the sun
that year Cavendish -- in faded violet velvet
and a century-old cocked hat -- fingered inflammable air
with a "singular love of solitariness."
Dark and toes sticking out from below the blankets,
face against the enormous window's cold pane;
Leonids on course through the Southern Cross;
Cavendish weighing the world from the basement
of his London mansion, sending the same note
each night to his servants: "Leg of mutton."
Dark stars empty the Nemean Lion across the ecliptic, its iron skin
alight with the debris of earthgrazers like rockets from the East.
No one in the gray streets below, no wind or fog;
the sky filled up as the world glides into astral dust.
Cavendish, in the last night on his measured planet,
recording the progress of disease through the body.