Touch

Hubble Ultra Deep Field .

I am not interested

in describing what you

already think you know in

a more interesting way.

I want magic.

You want answers.

Or a system, a grid

to run variables through

so you can say Oh, that.

But mystery wants you.

It stalks your quantifiable

dreams which can so

easily be explained by

chemical and instinct.

It goes in for the kill when your

heart swells over your sleeping child

or when you lose electricity for a few

night hours and no one’s there to

whittle away the expanse inside.

Doesn’t truth beget question

beget truth beget questions with

answers that are not answers that

unravel questions that dive into

the heart of an answer to find yet

another vast yet-unnamed universe?

Yes—no—love is strange

and unsayable, which is

why we toss it around

in one small word.

It makes the miles of our old intestines

as electric a maze as the whorls of each 
tiny handprint long before birth.

It burdens us with

words that tell who we are 
and a game of subtraction 
that, with such patience,  
closes our distances.

You don’t know what you want

and so you keep dissecting.

I once did that, too, yesterday.

Today I’m ready to

chase down a supercell

in true belief of my smallness,

the probability of death, the

impossibility of telling you

how it feels to be caught up

in that churning cloud.

Tomorrow I may be pulled apart

by that mysterious power to feel

anything at all and be moved

by it—whatever it is.

That we’re not hurtling through space—

that we are—that we’re not suspended

in chrysalis—that we are—

that we reach for each other here—

yet never quite know for sure—

and yet something wholly new yet

of us and our ancient backstory

comes of our not-quite-touching—

it is a miracle.

It is as plain,

as common,

as usual as the

next singular

act of being.