Veins

Rivers run
clock-wise
gathered seconds from
Hidden Springs
one way
gaining distance in
Time and Space
accommodates
this swelling of our souls,

after so many miles
consumed and minerals made
we carry all these
these accumulations
around
the middle
counter-clockwise

where all the numbered faces
count
on the moon
to turn cheek
and the Rivers rise
with mouths
full of asteroids.



Painting by Gertrud Staats, dated before 1938 in Public domain.

The Queen ties her rainbows from the ball

I entered the living room on Sunday in the late afternoon
with a basket of soiled laundry and on the floor lay the Queen,
sprawled out in a melancholy pool,
lyrics from her lips left hanging there aloft.

Drained and slightly dazed, she did not notice she had been singing,
her face was painted with dark minerals. Naturally,
she was shocked to see me, her pupils opened even more,
And her cheeks became velvety.

A little surprised to see her this disheveled way,
I asked if she was expecting rain-
teasing her mud faced tribal marks.
She said her body hurt, seriously, she had been dancing all night.
She did not want to break out.
With her toes pointed in my direction, resemblance spreads
like cold air. I am just stretching, she adds,
reaching out and away even more.

Interrupting us came a gentle tap-rapping at the door.
And after so many months of the same still frugal
air, the door began to swell inside its crust.
With a mustered force, she pried open the door,
as if held against her and boldly before her came an unexpected visitor,
A hint of something she mist, it had started to drizzle
and then it began to waterfall.
Her secret words had been heard, the clouds gathered to listen in.
We watched and welcomed this change of skies and days,
hearts and pace, pools of passing light and piles of cotton,
rectangles without edges, these divine Sundays,
spent simply
content in the castle with rain rolling around.
Another week cycles through and she has grown from Princess to Queen.
After all these loads I have carried, I  dutifully reflect the greys I've gathered,
the sun shifts and she thunders through
her bedroom, the walls tremble.
Busy casting rainbows by skipping stones,
she practices powers with her crystal eyes,
rocks, refracting pain into pleasure
from her chest full of gold

knowing she now controls the weather.








Painting by Xavier Mellery, 'The Artists Daughter' c. 1882 in the Museum of Fine Arts, Ghent [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

All complementarities aside

We tapped into the human genome

And are now mapping the brain

But you know we won't find love there either.

They scared us with the hole in the atmosphere,

Cosmic rays, acid rain. They tried terror

By burning down the forest before the cure

For cancer was cultivated.

The ice melts and minerals reinfuse themselves

Ionically with purpose, freeing radicals to cleanse

Surfaces.

Then this standard A brain met a utilitarian snaggle-

What’s it for? What about changes?

Yeah, the gold was soft after all.

There was common wetware

And we always knew how copper conducted itself

Generous with friction and actions without touch.

Entangled in the overhead wires,

Thought is under webs, like lines that meant complex

Life that we thought

we could emulate all the folds and it would comfort us

knowing love was no there to be found

nestled in tight corners and, residing

rather closer to a paradox between intelligent design

and first thought or dream.

Image credit By Smithsonian Institution from United States [No restrictions], via Wikimedia Commons.

Info via Wikimedia- Chandra telescope x-ray (2005): 

"The Chandra image shows a bubble of hot gaseous supernova debris (green and red) inside a more rapidly moving shell of extremely high-energy electrons (blue). These features were created as the supersonic expansion of the debris into interstellar gas produced two shock waves - one that moves outward and accelerates particles to high energies, and another that moves backward and heats the stellar debris. The relative expansion speeds of the hot debris and the high-energy shell indicate that a large fraction of the energy of the outward-moving shock wave is going into the acceleration of atomic nuclei to extremely high energies. This finding strengthens the case that supernova shock waves are an important source of cosmic rays - high-energy nuclei which constantly bombard Earth"