Something Now & Later

as time goes by, time goes, “Bye.”
as if a quick indifferent bird

I see a breezy blur
it could be me without being too absurd
which is hard to be inconspicuously

I wear my distance on my sleeve
I wonder how this thing occurred,
everything in sync so randomly,
look, even sky can’t make up its mind
it’s blue, it’s pink, it’s turquois as a sea,
it’s black as pitch the sense of blind,
disocular, a poet/ophthalmologist might say,
or deaf and dumb —in any case
as ineffable as any word expressing Is
we prompt our gods to say

por ejemplo, take a look at moon,
at atmosphere!
I breath invisibility
I take it in,
I suck like wind
then plunge a shovel in the ground
and wrench the thing around to upturn earth,
that 1st dust of “dust-to-dust”, milieu of birth;
the 2nd dust just speaks the second truth,
the ashy terminus of that which
loves and hurts and sobs and sings
of mist around the bend ahead
so typically devoid of mirth,
plump with mystery about which
reams of poetry’s been said and read
and heard

 . . . my daughter, just the other day
had a startling thing to say,
I couldn’t take it any other way
as I’d been in another mind
suddenly brought up short by
what it meant
—we were riding in a car,
off-hand remark, I don’t recall
what brought it out
but it was Christmas, after all,
celebration of a tale so tall
it reached beyond all galaxies
it’s end incredible, so out of sight
H. Sapiens still speak of it
and tell of it in books, sing arias,
pen symphonies, chorales,
work conundrums out in essays, plays,
wrack our brains in formulas,
but never get to what we must
but can’t while stationed here
amidst everything that rusts,
forever getting it only quite,
which suggests a cruel
unfairness of a rite

so, noting the monumental
unbelievability of what is,
down to the last atom and molecule
the miniscule intelligent properties of cells
their helical codes osmosis apoptosis
their evolutionary mutability
the improbability of All’s systems
which like clockwork operate as if God were
with a trillion fingers at the ends of billions of arms
spinning cogs adjusting as things go
the upthrust of Himalayas expiring breath-mists of
climbing sherpas hauling backpacks up through crags
elementary conglomerates of particles out of sight
fundamentally dancing to the music of the spheres
in a ballet of existence exquisitely choreographed
in brilliant choruses of dancers on an infinite stage
forever enmeshed

—my daughter simply said, ”With all this majestically
improbable detail; if the magical improbability
of this exists, why not the magical improbability
of something greater, a thing beyond beyond,
something now and later . . . .

Jim Culleny
© 1/29/22