From the Fishouse

Then weeding through birthroot in the neighbor’s
flower patch. Again, pole-dancing
at the Pink Pussycat. Once in Prague at a distance
one fall, cramming yourself and
child onto the number six tram
and I thought to call out

or recant, somehow, our widening elliptical
paths, but it was never
you to begin with. A trick of light sent back
over so many miles
they might as well be the very years themselves
which separate. Distance

is a tragedy of vision: the bus
pulls out of the depot; droning
planes knife through time zones, flash their polished
glint over shining seas.
I have measured the redshift at dawn, felt
the anisotropy of

touch and touch withdrawn long before
reading today’s news:
Hubble Telescope Provides Final Clue.
Cosmologists decipher
relative intensities of supernova
light, confirm space

bubbles with a dark energy, a mutual repulsion
among heavenly bodies
gravity should contradict. So the gloom
between star, planet, moon—
autumns and elections, rush hours and therapy sessions—
expands. There will be no

stasis here, no holding-pattern,
but a further, farther reach.
One other time at a farmer’s market near
Carthage, Missouri,
ten o’clock on a Sunday morning, presiding over
mounds of brown-tasseled corn.