Mark LaRue
ACROSTIC
Culled by my
stare, she turns away. When I
Open a book
in one of my random searches,
I see she is
the one the words have made.
No one told
me this story:
Caught
stealing sunlight, the birch was
Imprisoned in
the ground, stripped of its shimmer,
Drawn
trisected across boulders and flayed
Every winter.
Never sorry,
Never at a
loss when my trunk or limbs are
Cut like clay
by wreck or foe or slip or
Explosive, I
watch the wound clot into an eye.
PLEXUS
I wanted to
tell you I am happy
the photons
that gathered on me
to
participate in creating me
waving on
your retinas did.
I wanted to
add: "my" amino acids,
which you've
been so unconsciously
kind to
catenate and collect
in your brain
tissue, if dissected,
would
separate some of your father
from me,
would cut away the cheek-
bones of your
first husband from
my face
you've made in you.
Just the same,
I wanted to
thank you for however
carelessly
letting something unique
about me
remain inside the sad-
man plexus
still growing in your head.
GEOLOGY 101
The doctoral
astronomer prefers
talking about
planets, stars, between
digressions
shows videos of rocks, strata.
He quizzes
the class, defines carbon 2
and computer
dating (same pun every Fall)
but daily
strays to the sky. The young women
sitting at
the lab tables see the night
in his face.
In the evenings he spends his eyes
searching
equation and quadrant for floating stones.
Some are
burning, some reflect the fire;
cold, some
are held in darkness. He wonders
what his
optic nerves would feel like between
his fingers.
He thinks of a New Mexico
observatory
built into a hill
and Galileo
lying in the grass
under the
sunny Florence morning asleep.
The students
passing talk of painting. A recent
fresco done
sub rosa by three of their friends:
hillside
heather at sunset¾in an alley
between the
tinker's and the tinsmith's, where for
an hour every
middle day the sunlight
strafes
between the cobblestone walls,
emblazons the
watercolors and broken vessels
as if they're
from another world, where the sky
is yellow all
day long and every object
sparks its
colors outward, so the eyes
never tire,
lids fold unused, and the creatures
who glide
their scopes from star to face to stone
breathe in to
their cores all of the spectral hues.
THE UNIVERSE
FROM THE FRONT PORCH
1
On my brain,
as on Jupiter tonight,
there is the
Great Red Spot¾a monstrous storm
centuries
old, thousands of miles wide:
gouging up a
beachhead the size of the moon,
a hundred
tornadoes coughed out of one
of the
volcanic hurricanes. From the rim
of the eye a
flash of whispered lightning
splits a
thought down the middle,
exposing its
phloem to hot bright rain.
My neighbors
wave from the twilight they stroll
within, past
the porch they don't approach.
I work at my
checkbook and watch the figures
move slowly
through the wake of dusk.
How much of
me goes into Earth
times one
thousand would be
how much of
me goes into Jupiter.
What little
light passes through the skin stretched
across my
skull is reflected back out
by the
moon-white bone. It's clear to see.
My head (with
other heads) revolves about
the Earth on
a five to six foot orbit.
My brain
hangs in a dark space,
contemplating
stars. My aging head,
hung in
gravity, some day like a tired
satellite or
a chance meteor
will make its
hole in the ground.
Tonight as I
continue to fall I wonder
how I missed
disintegration in the stratosphere;
how it is I
add up to a mere subtraction
from the
earth I will come down to in the balance.
2
In school I
learned not to wish. Films of space suits
on the moon,
and like the lark that sings and wings
Its way at
dawn toward the sky in a higher flight
I wanted to
beat the atmosphere, to bring
my brain to a
height it would faint at, then fade
into parts of
stars. But I always came to.
I knew a girl
who could fly, solo,
who wanted to
be an astronaut
in all the
blue her eyes could gather.
And if I fell
in love she would admonish,
tell me not
to bother¾love equals entropy
squared by
age and youth, merely
an
exponential curve across the sky.
The
chimpanzee learned to ride rockets,
and to float
in satellites. Men learned how.
Then women.
One day Kimberly took me
in her
father's Cessna: "I want to live every
day as if I
were going to die that night."
We rose above
our neighborhoods,
in each
backyard a piece of the shattered
and fallen
summer sky. We climbed closer
to the
planets named for the goddesses and gods
who never
told the world they were there.
"Think
of it, Mark. Wouldn't you die to go."
I slipped my
fists under my seat belt,
stretched my
dizzy neck. And when
she set us
down and I threw up
on the
runway, I told her I would go with her.
She bent over
me and said we would try.
3
As evening
darkens the trees' green to black
and the
orange and yellow porch lights appear,
a million
stars unseen by the 21st Century
optic nerve
heat the familiar, cold
night sky. I
wonder what else out there
I can't see
might bump into me tonight.
If there are
stars our telescopes can
never show
us, simply because light
gets tired,
then goddesses and gods could be
out there on
the lawn right now, or sleeping
down on a
beach the dark side of Mars.
"Nay, go
see," says Galileo spinning in my mind.
And I agree.
It's a cat in the grass, tossing
a mouse. Yet
how many moons did Galileo
miss? And how
many dreams have I had
fade in the
crystalline morning sun.
4
When a
goddess shakes the sand from her hair
and new stars
appear (one soaring right now¾
see?¾toward
the horizon), who am I to say
we don't live
on the ball of Her foot,
or that She
didn't swim through Galileo's
blood, or
that Kimberly won't one day walk
on the Red
Planet.
As anyone always could.
Everything's
a possibility, I would tell her tonight.
Pick an
invisible star and make a wish.
You may lie
in a thousand graves before you die.
INTERVAL
At the piano
on the patio
he sat, the
morning sunlight
brightening
his knuckles. He played
one chord for
each cloud
that shadowed
his fingers.
Was it, he
wondered,
the sun that
moved
to silence
him; the clouds
moving in
silence; or
the Earth
that moved him
to silence?
It was, by midday,
another
summer noon,
and he would
play
nothing more
until nightfall.
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Last updated: May 1, 2001.