[northern hemisphere: on a beach above the 50th latitude at the end of winter]

(Winter-export), the beach frosted by fingers of polar constellations. It’s too cold to walk without huddling, but we do it nonetheless, because we only have one more night together. Your frothy hydro-rhythm spears into pith, irradiance; I breathe again, deeply. (Thick lips; quick still-hunt.) I rivet fronds of dependence into the seams of your boreal palms, never planning to return the floating colony of barnacles I promised I’d throw back; you, never planning to catch the sun bored through salt spray, clasping crisp foreheads, stitching on glistered lips and froze-shut lashes. And on a day when you didn’t rise early enough, I was left out in the water until my chest was steeped deep in ice over the thought of losing you. (Glimmering isle); my hair disheveled in sea-foam. Annular light. You pushed me in, and I relented. My isotherm sent chthonically. But you, in your legendary mantle, adapted my eyes to see the light hidden deep within your belt; such pinks and fuchsias I have never seen before, suddenly inverted. At absolute velocity, I cut my foot on sea-glass, bleeding blueshift, aligning to the colours of the zenith. You take me back to the starry house and we struggle with your parallax, a nadir inseminated on the celestial pole. (Parsecs quaking.) You whisper, I’ll heal you. I’ll heal you, only if you let me. Only if… you let me…  Over and over and over until it’s as mundane as the crashing coast, and unrivaled, I concede to everything and wake up deep in redshift, the whole universe escaping, warmth-ribbons suffocating the abyss: without you, alone on the ecliptic at last. In the spring-sinking, you order me a silver sword, sharp in starlight; to remember you. You stand a guardian, beyond the sun, flinging tiny ice-hot rocks (freighting gemstones); King of the Heavens. I submerge myself into the bathic depths, skulking in aestival despair, as you trade the night for day. Little do you know, my resurgence is also in your hands.

[i watched Orion slip from view every night this spring. No doubt he’ll return next winter... it’s sad losing a friend like that, for so long]

it all happens so fast
you almost look a little blue, baby
“here’s where the language barrier gets us”
you laugh now, but as you say that
your eyes are glued to the ground

when does every lovely thing break into shards?
always looking for the beginning of the end
this isn’t the way. hammer in your hand—
tear it all down, i say.
i’m done with this house of mirrors.

don't you almost feel a bit
like the guy who discovered fire?
there’s poetry before you fall asleep next to him
and there’s poetry after it.
the latter which is all worthless, of course.

turns out it’s rather comforting
to look in the mirror and see someone
other than yourself.
to see you, darling boy.

to see you.

The moon is content
to believe without
understanding why
she was placed where she
flies, orbiting space
and looking at time.

But the earth wants to know.

It wants to accuse
whoever carved out
its calderas,
and at every aphelion
the moon finds it harder
to move, like she can’t drag
herself back through the blues
of skies one more time.
The tether that holds
them together tears
her apart.

The moon doesn’t get
dizzy, but earth thinks
it’s spinning too fast,
sketches up the sky,
an engineered map of whys,
of stars connected
by thin pencil lines,
she thinks in miracles while it
thinks in margins of error,
equations, exponents.

On nights when she glows
green, the moon envies those pairs
who favor the power of two

because she squints and sees
the blueshift in earth’s eyes
as it crashes closer,
time spills out behind her,
space suffocates
between them, closer,
perihelion come,
and she blinks and sees
earth’s caldera eyes
raised to nothing.

Doppler shift frequency is equal to the change in velocity
Of the source divided by its velocity, times the observed velocity
And in electromagnetic radiation has a different name
Of  Redshift or blueshift coming or going its all the same

Redshifts , blueshifts answer to the letter “z”
And others in wavelengths too short to see
And so the universe is flying apart
Doing nothing more than its preordained part

Gets a boost from dark energy  and dark matter
Whose high energy photons scatter
And sometimes back to us and some we never see
Running away from us whose sight can never be

For there is a light barrier at 4906
Whose distance holds photons just for kicks
Four thousand nine hundred and six
Mega parsecs sticks

Light from ever reaching you and me
It’s sixteen billion light-years you see
And the galaxies redshifted past Z<=1.4
Are faster than the speed of light forevermore

Just beaming towards us caught in a cosmological undertow
That pulls it ever-on towards infinity whose celestial wind blows
It till the very essence of time standing still
And the stars all wink out and energy becomes nil

Dave Proffitt
2/9/2015
4:58 PM