Poetry
Scientific Inquiry
Robert Detman
Maybe you can understand
why I do not give you a thought
anymore, and hence, no letters,
like outgoing stinger missiles
in search of life, why I ignore
the world darkening like the edge
of newsprint under a magnifying
glass, the rumble of the dumpster
as it smashes upon the ground,
the patch of melted pavement
where activists set the street
on fire. Maybe you'd understand
dying goes on for millennia
and words are but plinking acid
rain on warm oceans where coral
is bleached to bright white bones,
and that a minute or less, fractions,
seem so long when counting
them down in anticipation,
though they are the same seconds.
And in giving me this thought
that I will not be returning,
there will be an unintended
signal that you and I will miss
and it will pass into the universe
to go on endlessly.
why I do not give you a thought
anymore, and hence, no letters,
like outgoing stinger missiles
in search of life, why I ignore
the world darkening like the edge
of newsprint under a magnifying
glass, the rumble of the dumpster
as it smashes upon the ground,
the patch of melted pavement
where activists set the street
on fire. Maybe you'd understand
dying goes on for millennia
and words are but plinking acid
rain on warm oceans where coral
is bleached to bright white bones,
and that a minute or less, fractions,
seem so long when counting
them down in anticipation,
though they are the same seconds.
And in giving me this thought
that I will not be returning,
there will be an unintended
signal that you and I will miss
and it will pass into the universe
to go on endlessly.
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Robert Detman is the author of Impossible Lives of Basher Thomas (Figureground Press). His writing is published in over seventy-five literary journals, and his stories have been nominated for the Best of the Net, and have been finalists for the New Letters Literary Awards, the Acacia Fiction Prize, and the Hudson Prize. burmaunderground.com
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