Alex Martin - Sparklers

9. Sparklers

Evening, on Beulah’s porch
out with the first stars,
talking, star-gazing.

I mention the radio-astronomers,
how they listen, to the faintest signals
from the earliest moment: Creation itself

a tremor, still rippling through us,
echoing, from behind the vault,
tolling, from our tallest belfry:

slow waves, from the beginning of time,
red shifts; discs in the desert; Cosmos on TV...
pulsars; red giants; black holes...

how the sky may be all riddled...
time punctured, like a mountainside
with these dark tunnels, and caves through...

wells down: to other skies, times, universes...
universes within universes...
If—say—you could only go far enough...

Mesons, mosquitoes, red giants…
lightning bugs, supernovas… poets talking to potters on a doorstep…
Beulah’s hunkered down
on the porch, above me: her face clouded over
brooding, thoughtful...

Time passes. The clouds disperse.
Thoughts animate her face.

Then, with one continuous motion
she’s on her feet: up-lifted by an image:

“Yes, when I think of God, just standing there, at the first,
in the dark: scattering stars out from him, for his own delight:
spraying them... sprinkling them… pitching ’em
out, from Himself, like… sparklers...”

“Not catching ’em back, see: letting ’em go,
releasing ’em, tossing ’em out… and out—
watching ’em go—far and wide...
before ever anything was...”

Raising one callused hand, she describes a circle
with a spraying, scattered motion,
and rubs it on the air, repeating it
reaching farther, with the words: and wide...

ineffably—like a timid wave, a child’s eraser over slate—
effacing, as she makes, her mark:
in deference to this awesome Motion
which hers must shadow.

“It’s this black hole ...may be how the spirits leave
this life: maybe that’s their way back, to the world they knew,
once before, and forgot; and yet, they’re aimed back there...
though the memory’s burned out of them, before they’re born...

“When my mother died: I seemed to see this cloud of vapor,
just overhead: I tried to paint it once; and this… sweat on her forehead,
like the start of the vapor trail.... This death-sweat: this death-dew
on her face: I touched with my lips...

“Her fingers’d press mine, and let go, press, and let go…
but each time, weaker... She was going slowly...

“Then they felt like there was nothing in them.
“But it wasn’t painful: it was a... release, see,
the clay opening out
and the spirit going up through that path of vapor,
through that black hole, maybe.

“I wouldn’t mind leaving: I wouldn’t mind at all,
if it wasn’t for my family.

“It wouldn’t be hard: it’d be like a little bird…”

Beulah cups her hands, her fingertips pointed up toward the thickening stars. She makes a crack in them, widens it slowly:
“It’d be like a bird: a little chick
cracking out of her shell.”