I've traded a calling for a port, and so find myself
arrived, happily, my toil and burden
shouldered squarely, but my grandmother,
she was restless in my dreams, leaving me
pitching from side to side, and sailing there instead,
intangibly, with only the lonely guides of footsteps.
and that port was not Vancouver
where Stanley Park had me torn between
park benches and silver sunshine beating
across the water soundly: this is a place of echoes.
and that naked sunlight,
I couldn't escape it, nor the benches
who each read to me of some one living ghost
in the endless trail a circle makes,
most plain, but one jumping forward
of towers in the sparkling sand, I was caught.
between words and between daylight.
it really is the end of something.

In this one, the last scattered neutrinos float
waiting for the black hole that
all other matters have passed through.
and they talk to each other
across improbable distances,
like zeros and ones, chattering:
there is only one true god, measured
by the absence, eternal and neverchanging.
they are laughing in the way
all voids are filled with laughter, chanting,
I will be what I will be.

it's all the still lifes, not just the Cezannes
and van Kessels, but all of them, lined up
in a stack, but not one waiting for another, no waiting,
there's really no longing,
just a frieze, or a stage picture that
even celluloid couldn't capture, being too thick.
and there you are suspended, and so is the ball, and
both hanging in the air.  it always has been this way,
exactly this, the blood is not pumping through your veins, and
the fingers are not clenching their hold on the leather, and the mitt
is not reaching or pointing, not opening or closing, and the ball
has come from nowhere and is going nowhere.
the fans do not heckle or celebrate your leap, runners,
they dance, but only on base,
or between shortstop and third, pitching forward,
not falling or sliding.
around, the city lights are all the colors that lights are,
but no cars move around the park.
and a single note, how much less is there
than a note, hitting the eardrum?

but everything is electric, turned on, numinous,
though the city doesn't pump anything,
nothing burns, or dies, neither now nor later.
the land doesn't bury or produce and you know nothing of it
as you live suspended,
like the Tarot card sitting on your desk.
it's laughable, really, "your" desk-
it miles away, and you here.  the ocean,
not pulled by any moon, but seeming to reach
toward tide, the sand begging,
the moon and the baseball,
there's no difference which you catch, no spin,
no galaxy rotation, no red shift, or blue,
nebula, expansion, heat death, the event horizon,
drift, curvature, none of it.
a calculus of tricksters, charlatans

I was promised an end, promised heat or light, the
claustrophobic crunch, or the cloying heat of
the end of entropy, no more exchanges, no transfers.
I was promised the void, promised cold, distance, the failure
of weak forces to hold weak forces, I was promised gravity,
substance, dimension, momentum, force.
and I was promised time.
time with you,
and only the faintest murmur
of a will to reach.