jackshoegazer | This is the poem I'm turning into workshop tomorrow.

Star-Crossed

On the telephone, I was absent
ly looking at the calendar you bought for my birth
day. It was December and it was a photo
graph (from the Hubble Space Telescope)
of a peculiar arc of light
bridging two galaxies
two-hundred and fifty thousand years apart,
called ARP-295.

These are light years we’re talking about,
so even traveling at top speed on an ice-rutted road
to your faraway house in my old blue Ford with the busted AM radio,
even in a super-sleek spaceship at one-hundred and eighty-six thousand miles per second,
(that’s the speed of light)
I would die a million deaths
and never bridge that gap.

They passed through one another (the galaxies)
their mutual gravity exchanging plumes of stellar
suns, stardust, and sulfur
(or perhaps semen, saliva, and sweat,
the smells of sex)
in some celestial alchemy I never understood
(though I suspect you always did)
and they abandoned that bridge of life
(I mean light)
in their wake.

It seemed like so much detritus,
so much like you
and

me.

(A brief flash of light
for a moment
in the dark.)

Some distances were never meant
to be traversed, like
the moment when I was still talking
but you weren’t on the line

anymore.