Beautiful Universe

Here is a love poem. Its magnificent spectrum of emotions – tenderness, longing, wanting, love – is to the recipient greater, more profound and decisive than the lines and stanzas Cummings, Dickinson, Neruda or Whitman have ever woven. Here is a love letter that is no longer just an intimate correspondence between two souls bewitched by each other, but an affirmation that love exists, breathing ceaselessly within the time of its unfolding, gravitating and pulsating endlessly thereafter.


BEAUTIFUL UNIVERSE
By: The guy with glasses driving a silver gray Toyota

I see the small window
of my cellphone light up with a message from you:
“What are you doing now?”
I send you these words: “Back home, in my room, in bed,
looking at photographs
in an astronomy magazine: so called images of heavens,
breathtaking views of planets,
comets, galaxies, constellations.” Something like that.



Something more, actually.
for the truth is, the magazine is Sky & Telescope,
and this I’m holding now
is its yearend special edition titled Beautiful Universe,
which I found this afternoon
while killing time, lost in stacks and shelves and boxes
of second-hand glossies
cramped in one of those Book Sale black holes.



The truth is, I bask in this
infinity of swirling, swaggering supernovas,
nebulas sensuous and subtle,
the emerald rain of aurora borealis, Saturn’s rings ridged
and radiating beyond the page,
sunflares, moonblooms, grandeur defying gravity,
the soul and span of stars,
all of boundless space for a basement bargain price.



In another time and place,
I would have seen something else in these wisps
of cotton-candy gas and dust,
this blue heart of the Iris Nebula, these two galaxies
collectively called the Antennae
in Corvus ripping each other apart, or Mars’
water-gouged channel
Reull Vallis and rift-gashed craters of that red planet.



In another time and place,
I would have mourned these muddled wounded skies,
these scarred tissues, the stillborn
and solitary adrift in amniotic fluid, curdling, festering,
bearing the chaos and clutters
of celestial debris, arbitrary explosions, cracks and webs
bereft of meaning or magic,
meandering specks and pricks in a world dim and mute.



Ah, but the small window
where you string words and wishes for me shows exactly
the latitudes of love, here
and now in this orbit where you and I, despite
our separate islands, pulsate
and persist as one, our every heartbeat a pinpoint
brighter than Orion’s belt,
deeper than the Ring Nebula or Big Dipper’s bowl.



For the truth is, what I’m doing
now is thinking how you navigate my body, how you
cast light and song upon my soul,
how your spirit overflows into mine, bridging time
and distance and uncertainty,
the pages I hold and the messages you send
opening our windows wider
and wider into this beautiful universe I share with you.