And the puzzles surrounding the cosmological constant,
spacetime imploded into existence. Ten to fifty years
between asbestos breathed and mesothelioma
discovered, a rare form of cancer in the lungs
or heart, or, if in the stomach, spreading
quickly to the liver or spleen. Uploaded
onto one of a half-a-billion or so blogs: “The human
imagination? A relatively paltry thing, a subproduct,
merely, of the neural activity of a species
of terrestrial primate”; and in another, that other
dimension, the Hudson River, black and still,
the day about to open at the Narrows’ edge.
Light on a mountain ash bough, a fresh chill’s
blue sensation in the eyes. One week buds, then
the temperature’s up and the landscape turns yellow,
in a few days the wind scratches the blossoms,
in a few weeks the sun scorches the leaves.
I, too, see God adumbrations, I, too, write
a book on love. Who, here, appears, to touch the skin.
Hundreds of thousands of square miles of lost
Arctic sea ice, bits of bone on killing grounds,
electromagnetic air. Atrocious and bottomless
states of mind, natural as air.
from So Where Are We? by Lawrence Joseph (2017). Reprinted in A Certain Clarity: Selected Poems by Lawrence Joseph (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2020).