190

Father
It is all one to me now. The mass
            Of nebulae teeming with new births of stars.
                        The bright gasses that burn, violet and burgundy
And gold, like bruises on the flesh
            Of the deep. The ephemera of comets that die
                        In their long flights like angels of sleepless earth.
The fugitive lights that pass beyond the reach of
            Our human sight. The fragments of their fire that
                        Fall to earth, communicants of their own burning.

We may think of a state of no energy
            As admitting no potential for force, that God must
                        Reach from some station of the outer dark to will
This work in motion. What if a vacuum
            Were the ultimate state of becoming? A state so
                        Pregnant with the lack of and necessity for energy
And mass and the phosphored, fluid pathways
            Of being, that it could birth the totality of all energy?
                        Astral wind, that carried the seed out of the night.
This mechanism : the motion of a dream.

            Your image falls across my thought, as from
                        A projector. The coincidence of our forms in space
Is what we call love. The pale flower
            That burns in the movement of the wind.
                        The soul of the giraffe distended in the atmosphere.
Our child destroyed by fire.
            The earth has receded : I have inherited the void.
                        In the dust of the stars the darkness is a pale flower.
Come down from heaven, honey,
            For earth has gone away and life is over. We are lost :
                        Our loves flee before us like visions of a dead world.