Possible
2 Minutes Read Time
It takes almost nine minutes
for sunlight to reach earth
so there is a glance of time
in the morning, the predawn gray
my children love, when light
has departed the station, out
for delivery, and we don’t even know
what ultraviolet thought moves
toward us. Three times this week
a book has reminded me we are made
of the dust of stars. I will try
to think of this more
as I rinse ketchup from plates
or search through drawers for batteries.
And what does it change
if I hold that thought as carefully
as I hold a yolk in my palm?
To be made of something
I don’t know and will never see?
The other day my daughter asked
where her brother was before
he was born. Remember, I began,
he was in my tummy—No,
she said, where was he before that?
Where. Where was he.
(Maybe the thought must change
my answer.) He was
hydrogen in my body,
carbon at the center of the Milky Way.
It is possible to exist
before you exist. He was an idea
in the mind of God. A swarm,
hum of the bees
atop the roof of Notre Dame,
about to escape the flames
against the odds,
the small bodies their own spire
of smoke curling toward nowhere
but here, here, here.
Here my son rips pages from a book:
in one sense, I’d call it destroyed,
flaked all over the floor, but in another,
each word returns to what it once was.
What was before sound and symbol?
Black vapor. Unclaimed claw. Something
viscous and raw, like honey,
but elemental, but almost.
Read more from Issue 17.2.
