Side Effects
The night I held the Pleiades in my hand,
someone told me that eating the mushrooms
would make the meadow sparkle,
but I might feel afraid.
What he later said was soft and wild, I don't recall at all,
but I remember the stars between my lifted fingers,
dancing.
My son worries aloud that the meds
will change him into someone he won't recognize.
So we lie in the grass on a clear night.
In these days when both intimacy
and the longing for it
are killing us off,
I find that I am no better equipped
to judge six feet at a glance
than I am six parsecs.
As usual, the stars seem to know better,
the distance between them
enough that they can rage for centuries
and choke on their own nuclear smoke
and explode into bottomless hunger
without noticeable carnage.
But still they have formed quarantine pods
to tell their stories of love and vanity and war
by the campfires.
Once in a theology class,
I learned that trying to describe God
is like poking pinholes in a velvet curtain
to study the light behind it.
You do get a little bit of the truth,
and if you want to make it in academia,
you are well-advised not to admit just how little it is.
I begin to wonder if, when the good-hearted poets die,
they are welcomed to Elysium
with a scroll of all the words
they didn't have time to learn to use
and all of the syntax of all of the lost languages,
and a notebook thick enough for eternity.
I hope it turns out to be true.
I hope I turn out to be good-hearted.
Abstraction soothes him,
so he tells me in my left ear
that the composition of the night sky
requires the presence of all light
and the absence of all light.
I invite his anxiety to leaf out.
God knows I was afraid of everything when I was 15,
and without Google, I hadn't even heard of prosopagnosia.
Three whole people I know have died, one by one,
each of the last three days,
and he thinks surely that means something is coming.
So, by way of reassurance,
I tell him the Something is already here,
and always has been.
And I tell him that when she died, the poet,
I felt her brush past me,
the way your shoulder brushes a pine tree
in the open-armed woods,
and that she knew the trail well enough,
even in the dark,
and that she, for one, was content
to be no more and no less
than the scattered, touchable stars,
one pinhole of infinitesimal infinity.
