White Dwarves

I want to believe the Aztecs,

that once you eat the heart of a dragon

you can understand animal language.

I want to believe that Andromeda M31

is just a mirage, like love.

Today someone has been crying

in the house across the street. Someone

is masturbating just up the road

right now. They sound the same

to me. We aren’t that different from the cicadas

or the Century Plant; all we do is die. The sounds

we push out into the universe take their time to arrive.

Just yesterday the radio waves we’ve been shooting

out into space since the ’50s reached the corner

of our galaxy. Somewhere a boy has just reached puberty,

his bones mimicking the slow stretch of the universe.

When he speaks in his sleep tonight he won’t notice

the small crackling in his voice. A new word is born.

An idea grows old. Time slips its hands in our pockets

and laughs. It happens again: I started by writing

the story ends with your brother Matt

peeling the tabby from the pavement

            the skull crushed

            the spots on its stomach

little constellations

a name

The body

milk-warm

he places it on the sidewalk

can’t look at his date

She says

            I think that’s my cat

            I think that’s my cat

and knows

Then the lightning. Then, the long drive home

where you pass the remains of a car with its passengers

burned to death inside. The year of sleeplessness,

night terrors and waking to women you don’t love,

your ex still possessing your bones. This is an apology.

Because in Thailand a monk gathers boys

from the sex trade and sells them to miserable

bastards here in the West. Because Kamajors behead RUF soldiers

in Sierra Leone, and RUF cut off Kamajor hands and dicks,

spike them on poles and parade the streets. In China

poachers kill endangered tigers, make Viagra from their bones.

You said we are not here to be happy, and I agree

this is what we do: drink alone at dive bars

reading Bukowski, waiting to die,

or else crying for the woman raped on the reservation

who can’t tell her friends. Once you were so drunk

you pissed on a stranger’s lawn, looking in through the window

at the family. Once a brunette sat down at the table with us

and barked. Where does this lead? That poor woman. If only

the cat didn’t have spots, or she hadn’t seen it lying in the road.

If only her father hadn’t died a week before, and maybe if your brother

had known just what to say.

This world is beautiful, only because of the massive black hole

pulling all our light into its heart; only because the scrub jay,

witness to its own mortality, sings in alarm for its dead

until it is joined around the body in a prayer only understood

by the ash of the forest, stretching away from its origin.

Like our universe, it will soon collapse.

Let us die dreaming—pretending we will go on forever,

voices large as the Terra Cotta Army in the tomb of Qin Shi Huang.

Let us be the paint that evaporates from their faces.

Let us be that dust.