Assisi: An Online Journal of Arts & Letters Volume 4, Issues 1 & 2 | Page 14

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JED MYERS

CRADLE
Last night, under the wide black sky,
the moon high in the east still near
full, and Jupiter a dimensionless bright
spot less than a thumb-span below,
I thought, desireless. But no—
though it was just that solace I sought,
though I’d pulled on my coat and gone out
to hear that silence, to bask
in the ungraspable distance, as if
to let my whirlwind of longings unravel
and dissipate into the dark, though there was
that great cradle of emptiness slung
between the mute moon and that planet
at its gravity-rope’s end close
to a half-billion miles out—I knew,
even the vacuum bristles with want,
sizzles, every thoughtless thimbleful
of nonexistence filled with original
wish to exist, urgent each instant
to transmit the oncoming ripples
crossing in all directions at once,
the waves of attraction, neutrinos, photons
racing through their eternal present
genesis spark to absorption…. Yes,
I thought, even the cold void works
hard to belong, a desperate business
birthing the suns, pulling the moons
along in their orbits, keeping a giant
like Jupiter strung and hurtling round
its twelve-year ellipse. So I muttered
a personal thanks for the nothingness
holding us, returned, turned in….

!!Assisi!!!8!