Flirting with Time
Even sunlight is eight minutes old.
Everything around is coming from the past.
Looking as far away as we can is a lot of times ignoring what’s in front of us.
Almost every element inside of us, after all, is made from an exploding star.
Making every atom in our body about 86 billion years old.
I tell you, “When we look at the stars, we are looking at our pasts.”
We sit on a blanket drinking moon tea and bourbon. “See there you are,
a little girl. Every moment is a place you’ve been,” I smile.
“The voyage might feel like emptiness, but it’s not,
it’s full of the histories of our grandparent’s love stories
and men who saved lives in war, and concerns of self
that never came to be.” You smile at me,
“If you cry in space, the tears will just stick to your face.
This conversation, this night, is being recorded in time.
There will come a time when you will look up at the sky and think,
about sitting barefoot with me in the Milky Way
as I rattled facts to you about the universe.“
Tonight when I go home, I will talk to my window,
and I will say everything. I will tell it everything..
About your beauty and my inability to flirt,
so I have to depend on stupid random facts of science.
My body will lie down in bed and I will miss your delicate smile.
“The furthest galaxies are speeding away from us at 90% the speed of light;
it’s hard to imagine things moving so fast. The universe seems so
calm, so not frantic. I guess things are never as they seem.”
Sometimes when I’m with you, I feel my mind is moving that fast.
I wonder how I appear. I could ask, but I don’t want to know.
If you fall into a black hole, you stretch out like spaghetti.
The opposite of a black hole is thought to be a a white hole,
which spray out light and matter like fountains.
I wonder what it’d be like to run through the fountain of a white hole with you.
I tell you, “275 stars were born in star nurseries today.
The middle of the universe smells like raspberries and tastes like rum.“
Tonight, here, it smells like the world does after rain.
When you close your eyes tonight, I imagine you thinking about all this.
Our bodies singing as we dance in the light and matter spewed by white holes,
in the scent of raspberries and rum, together,
tethered to a moment time will never forget.
Even if you don’t end up loving me, it’s documented in space and time.
The night I dreamed you might love me
and filled your head with the science of it all.
Oak Roads: Poetry and Musings 