At the edge of a weathered postcard,
the faintest glisten, by which memory holds true
and offers proof—There were people, a trip,
a sea, clouds, fragile patterns, mist.
There was this life, where we dreamed,
and so this postcard, this fated token
from an ancient future, between grave and laughter,
which you will one day hold between your hands
and realize you were in heaven the whole time.
To the call of light,
Music, unending, beckons
you to harmonize.
Ask a child,
any child,
what the difference
is between Monday and Thursday?
No matter how they respond,
look them in the eyes
and tell them how wonderful
they are.
The other day
I met a monk who juggled watermelon seeds
with his tongue.
When I asked him how he did it,
he spit the seeds at me,
a staccato stream of seeds
as if the monk were no monk at all
but rather a cartoon gangster, or vaudeville gunner.
I ducked.
All of the seeds flew over my head
except for one, the lone seed that clung
to the top of my shoulder.
The monk’s eyes wrinkled with silent laughter,
which soon emitted from his nostrils and mouth
as a soft hissing sound.
How do you do that, he pointed at the seed
perched on my shoulder.
I smiled and shrugged and the seed fell off.
On the way home I stopped at the grocery store and bought a watermelon.
When I got home I cut it open and made a project out of seed-removal.
Then I tried juggling seeds with my tongue,
but couldn’t do it.
Several hours later, having not made any progress with my juggling act,
I sat down and stared at the lovely sloppy wreckage of watermelon and rind,
and at, or rather into the dreamlife of seeds gathered in a small glass bowl.
I picked up one of the seeds and planted it on my shoulder.
It’s easy, I said, as if the monk were there watching and listening,
and his silence roared like the most marvelous applause.
Between passages,
a dark pause to recollect
the lighted means home.
The Martians,
in their conscious longevity,
stamped our passports
and immigration documents
long before our legacy of amnesia
broke
and we came to realize
that everything, including our sense of planetary privilege,
has been a sham, a lost man’s desperate invention,
and while some wept and wondered, and wandered with nowhere to go,
others kept right on,
working their jaws religiously,
in chewing stick after stick of savior chewing gum,
which apparently becomes the stickiest stuff on earth
when engaging contact with foreign matters,
and other things true
to the calling of home.
Void is boring,
a dull throb.
It has no stories to tell.
And yet, from the gaping orient
of emptiness
arises every story imaginable,
a turning to peaks
and sea-changes galore.
It seems
void is the company
we are destined to keep,
an inheritance beyond the sealant of claim,
while stories become
our children and lovers,
the warmest ephemeral gains
to hold us, briefly, in tenderest thrall.
The difference between
I am here
and
I was here
is delicately slight,
and not really a matter of tense
but rather one of plaited tenor
and climate,
in which degrees,
separating our ghost from our dreams,
keeps us shivering warmly
between rippling sheets
of ephemera,
and the audacious
memory of longing.
In the darkroom
of your own solitude
the slowly developing
photographs
of your life
can be recollected
forwards,
as if chronology
were a fugue,
and you
its vigilant timekeeper,
twice removed.
