In the night’s most present moment–
non-duplicable, gone–
the starlight on our faces
was a million light-years old.
I changed.
You changed too.
The light went on.
We change beyond choice,
bound to the universe
as congruent events
of its endless origin
as well as its momentary whereabouts,
each breath and heartbeat subject
to an absolute relative
spatio-temporal plenitude
of possibilities, delusions, and births,
arrangements and derangements,
properties, principles, and mysterious powers,
some as strict as gravitation,
some as random as a lizard in the soup.
You change it.
I do too.
I was trying to write the history of an instant,
to sustain the exact point
where it opened into song,
joined the sunlight shaping the river,
the starlight on our faces,
the fire under the bubbling soup.
You dove from the opposite shore
and swam toward me with the moon in your throat,
body gliding underwater
like the shadow of a bird.
Your passage changed the current,
changed the river,
changing you and me.
What we know is never the same.
It scatters like starlight in the mind;
fades into the future it creates:
nothing lost, nothing gained, going on
as the mutable condition of mortal grace.
This starlit song began along the river,
singing with you in the summertime dusk,
barefoot and cuddled on the cooling sand
waiting for the stars to emerge in this world,
as the slow green river gathered our shadows,
singing at the top of our voices
till our toes curled,
and I changed into you changing too.
Not for ever, maybe,
but for sure.