A quarter way through my life, my poles -
which totter and sway much like our big aqueous globe’s magnetic tips
- reversed, flipping my longitudinal makeup
so my seasonal impulses were lost

You see, for many years, my small fist of a time piece
would coo like a spring sparrow when it felt the vibrations
of humanity tightening its lot, fortifying its mass ever denser
pulling in all light and energy with its Newtonian might

My heart felt the pulsing pressure of the city,
its verve and noise, the late night jazz and clang of the El
the clack of heels on pavement, the hiss of the prostitutes from the dark,
and my metronome pushed back, its tiny weight braced like an unfinished home
by so much living, by so many other hearts playing their staccato hopes
in the morning hours when Philadelphia’s buildings and streets
bloomed like a forest in spring; and there is a city’s great triumph,
a whole year compressed into a day: noon’s languid pandiculating
lunches, evening’s autumnal efflorescence, brake lights and office towers aflame
deep night’s barren hibernation, our world in miniature
channeling our currents to be borne once more in rhythmic, reassuring existence

So humanized were my instinctual energies, all I could see
was encroaching nature, the unsightly weeds between lanes on Broad,
wilting daffodils squelched underfoot on the sidewalk
my eyes, unable to measure all ends of the color spectrum,
like ear drums too weak for higher pitches, could not register
all our interminable refuse enmeshed in tree branches along the highway,
did not mind the alloyed sheen of our rivers, chose to admire
their gem-like refractions, to embrace the muddled red haze
above our sleeping city like a celestial womb of gas,
breathing new life into the universe

Then I met a girl with a deep and abiding love of skinny dipping at dawn,
of hurling her spindly tetrad deep beneath the slimy grasp of seaweed
so deep that mollusks grow between her toes and algae takes root in her sienna hair
We run down bluffs together barefoot, impaled by sticks while the crystalline
grind of sand embeds our wounds with its quartzite heat
We walk along the Delaware and close our eyes to let its ancient flow
wash over us like a susurrant embalming sleep
called back by the fecund smell of carbon decomposing on its banks
and the fraying tickle of rain on the backs of our necks

She teaches me the languorous beauty of northern Wisconsin in summer
air so light you fear it’s not real, and a night sky milky with inhuman creation
while we lie reposed in the middle of a lake, bobbing with the insouciance
of our earth’s nickel heart lolling inertly in magma, solidifying and drying
like two cracked eggs in the manic schizophrenic sun,
pushed about like dust in solar winds, tranquil and cracked as our dead moon

But our bodies are like small galaxies, we birth to form and spin
guided by unseen streams of energy until we collide with another body
sometimes, we collide with such might that our fields of gravity
pull and contort until two shapes merge to one
but other times, our dalliances flare like a sun burst and our bodies
pass through each other, resistant to the universe’s invisible forces
though in our individual wakes, we trail the beautiful blue remnants
of our collision like a fading birthmark

Still hemorrhaging her trellises of matter, finding myself cowed
as civilization once more squeezes urbanely together with unseen strength of antimatter
the palpitations of my muscular being contracted like pupils surprised with light,
igniting an old, eternal spark, a scintilla flickering in memory
as it does in all organisms faced with extinction: Run,
run until your legs crater like Europa and your arteries harden like the core of Mercury,
run until every heaving wave of your being, radiating with distant red warmth
burning with the expansive speed of creation, pulls its matter free
from the city’s engulfing, precipitous rim
until you are floating now beyond the limits of humanity
like a red dwarf that has threaded its way through the mine field of ancient quasars
beyond known time and space, perceive your body as it plunges through the water,
its reverberations rippling endlessly outwards, through a lake with no shores
beneath a luminous Andromedal sunrise