Dark matter where the space
between stars,
the space between bodies, is not there. Still
there is the journey home
to a house in the trees, the body
sheltered by forests, the fallen, the upgrown,
the rise of mineral earth, the traveling fluids,
the leaves each with their own green lantern light
veined, breathing human air
and you walk to this house from darkness unprepared
from the first breath
that opens you to the world
with eyes that do not see what you are made of
as if a human is a plant that opens only at night,
trusting, even asleep
in the pathway of blood
the organs that could cover miles
uncontained,
as if space is inside the human.
Time, too, the uncounted minutes,
not those that began with the birth of Christ
or even with the quickening,
but the older revelations
inside the human the secrets
that one day will be known
as when the storm took away the sand of the beach
leaving black lava underneath,
or when the mudslide revealed a forgotten village
or when the water diviner found a lost city
covered with ash.
and will be, divined, found.
Something underneath,
the inward minutes,
larger than the body they live inside.
Or maybe it is more than that
as when light drops into the ocean
when night begins.
Or less, if you could call it that,
like the robin egg that fell to the ground.
Less, too, than was imagined,
the human salvaged
from the lives and deaths of other worlds
so small in the galaxy of immortal beings,
passions so seemingly large,
accidental atoms of stars and dust.
And more. There is to a person a mystery,
the inward map, the sixth sense,
and then there is the remembering
the parts unknown and the knowledge
of science that says
there is no true sight of the world.
The eye, remember, with its straight
dark channels of vision, turns the world over,
not that it rights it.
And then there is the outside world,
not just vision, bright or dark,
but bone hunters searching the great forgotten distance
of the past, prophets seeing the future,
gazing into night sky,
entrails, crystals, or fire,
and it doesn’t matter when they look at the sky
through a piece of glass
and infinity is how far you can see
through something solid,
but there is an angle of sight
that fits or reads the present bone
in the way there is not a
change of time, except measured
and told in words directly revealed
from before instruments and the lens.
And then, when you reach the forest body
with its lantern light
you find the branches covered with snow
and walk to it
and now knowing
the breath that goes out
may become something unbound and clear.
Now, it is now, the winter count begins,
the hides with the old ones painted with stories
that show what has occurred,
these stories, too, divinely lived and told
without instruments or lenses
to enlarge a sight.
Open it, the animal skin, the flesh, the primal hide,
and read the names and deeds, those of a history
that made this time
desperately unremembered
and suddenly known.