Brief History of a Sentence
Let’s start with the big picture:
The universe, i.e., great outward rush
Of fires and nights, and at its edge, among thickets of matter
Fraying, a star
Devolving into helium
And its sidekick, shine.
Which light
(Wave or particle? Music or poetry?) dashes
Through eons of miles until it impales our own
Blue-green wonder
Of continental drift, brokenhearted kin of the Hominidae.
You know the place.
Whereon stands (say it’s a woman) a woman
On her porch, cold clear night in December, another autumn
Trashed. Let’s pause
To mark our seasonal acquiescence to the powers
Of wind, the planet’s dogged whirl. . . .
She draws her sweater close. The star punches its pinhole beam
Through the city’s
Steady nerveless glow, arriving
Just as the woman—let’s make her me—
Just as I look up,
A scintillating pebble sinking
Into my eye,
The retinal rods and cones
Honing the star to a hot
Potato of light tossed neuron to neuron.
And I, for a moment, a filament burning.
Under the power lines, among the sagging porches of my
Broken city, I am
Emerson on the Common, stoked
By the beyond, stowing for the universe
Its own erupted face.
Whereupon I make my sentence
For nothing and no one
But the rosebush my landlady tied
Sebastian-like to a stick
And cajoled into bloom; I say to that now defunct,
Thorned, stem-of-a-thing,
That’s a star I haven’t seen
before.
And the bush listens.