Fragility

I saw today that NASA has published new Hubble Telescope images--galaxies just beyond our own, star systems billions of light years away, gas masses in space. One of those galaxies is supposedly sucking up our own. In a few billion years, it will have eaten ours alive, in a kind of cosmic cannibalism. The universe dazzles and disorients . . .

I am working on a series of poems that have to do with a journey through the desert between Phoenix and Los Angeles. I've called them "highway love poems." But the cosmos also plays a part in these poems--how could constellations and aliens not show up, considering the geography of sitings and the presence of dark sky at some points in the desert. And love, too . . . My mind keeps wandering back to desert and space and relationship, and my pen keeps going back again and again into those spaces.

I love these poems, unfinished and fragmented as they are at the moment. Why? One reason is because they started by looking at Aaron's photos. They are something we have shared together, some small fragments of our lives, some wondering at the mysterious parts of our existence, some space where what each of us does as separate human beings touches and breathes into the other. They are beautiful and fragile, like human relationships. Emphasis on fragile.

Lately that emphasis has been all too clear to me. I can't speak the fragility out of anything I say or do or experience. Sometimes the web breaks. Sometimes our relationships become painful and we don't know what to do. The only answer I have is just to be still and be present in these moments, when things seem chaotic and uncharted. I look at those photos of the universe and think I am in the presence of so many secrets. My emotions, my body, my experiences are only a tiny glint in the whorls of deep space and time.