Straight up away from this road, Away from the fitted particles of frost Coating the hull of each chick pea, And the stiff archer bug making its way In the morning dark, toe hair by toe hair, Up the stem of the trillium, Straight up through the sky above this road right now, The galaxies of the Cygnus A cluster Are colliding with each other in a massive swarm Of interpenetrating and exploding catastrophes. I try to remember that.
And even in the gold and purple pretense Of evening, I make myself remember That it would take 40,000 years full of gathering Into leaf and dropping, full of pulp splitting And the hard wrinkling of seed, of the rising up Of wood fibers and the disintegration of forests, Of this lake disappearing completely in the bodies Of toad slush and duckweed rock, 40,000 years and the fastest thing we own, To reach the one star nearest to us.
And when you speak to me like this, I try to remember that the wood and cement walls Of this room are being swept away now, Molecule by molecule, in a slow and steady wind, And nothing at all separates our bodies From the vast emptiness expanding, and I know We are sitting in our chairs Discoursing in the middle of the blackness of space. And when you look at me I try to recall that at this moment Somewhere millions of miles beyond the dimness Of the sun, the comet Biela, speeding In its rocks and ices, is just beginning to enter The widest arc of its elliptical turn.
~ Pattiann Rogers, "Achieving Perspective" in THE GRAND ARRAY