For All I Know

For all I know

For all I know your earthen eyes

have long been lidded, stopped

pouring light into the world long ago,

or perhaps not yet.

On the barren moon, no air

to lift the empty dust, no motion

except the blows of cosmic debris;

is this the derelict garden

where we will never meet again,

a passive absence, slapped silence, stillness

round nothing? Little matter if it is

you say, we’ll never know

as we don’t know now, and there,

Laocoön-like  in the curves of the wyrm, is

where we worry at the strangling knot, no more 

than huddled kobolds over a scroll

in which we are forever illiterate

and which in our play we deface.

Perhaps even cobalt darkness is better 

than black if within it we can put lights.

Here flat stones to cover us, carved to

mimic all the layered leaves of lies,

tell us, wait for the day

when that beam of unlight, unflesh

will pierce us all and hang us

on its string, a blowing ornament

in the solar wind,  eyes wide open,

each pupil some bright new star,

or else, perhaps some

phosphorescent decay.

April 2011

Photo:Face of the Moon, 
Courtesy of Jet Propulsion Laboratory/NASA

FURTHER COMMENTING DISABLED ON THIS POST DUE TO SPAMBOT ACTIVITY