We like the slow trains,
the
cable cars that crawl up the hill
giving the horizons a slow reveal,
the Golden Gate
unfurling at your feet,
because
that's how it is when you approach your peaks--
the
world before you grows
from
the sky on down.
We
like the gradual assessments,
the
learning to love someone slowly,
the
coming to realize,
bright, startling moment after bright, startling moment
how
wonderful, how absolutely mesmerizing
someone
is to you now,
like
a puzzle filling in, except instead of cardboard
the
pieces are all made of
stars being born.
We
like to laugh until we cry, we know this,
but
it isn't until later in life that we come to understand,
that
it is given to us to know,
that
what we need even more is to cry until we laugh.
Exactly
one lifetime ago, I wished for a baseball to remain
suspended
in the air between two people.
Something
I'd longed for intensely was about to come true,
and I
wanted my dream to remain forever unconsummated,
forever
suspended,
forever
untouched by time, history,
or
any of the other agents of erosion
that
would wear away the purity of
my
Arcadian abstraction.
But
that baseball was caught, and celebrations ensued,
and
that Platonic ideal, birthed finally
into
actual space, and actual time,
began
within days to acquire life's dusty, wonting patina,
became
something remembered, something that happened,
once,
and
then was lost,
another
moment dropped into memory's undifferentiating sea.
But I
was wrong.
Because
all there is is duration. All there is
is
constancy, the person you continue to be
before
and after and during
the
moments you live through,
the
one by your side at all times, even when she's not,
the
one whispering to your ear at your bedside,
even
when he's a thousand miles away,
both
of you looking up at the same gibbous moon,
both
of you now satellites of each other,
forever,
all because of those stars being born.
You'll spend your next two lifetimes
yoked to their density,
in
continuous elliptical thrall,
your
world every morning governed
from
the sky on down.
