First Trip To The Infinite Poem by Deborah DeNicola

Years before pop tops, I was five or six next to my brother
on a redwood bench. I held a can of orange soda
and looked through the triangle my Mother's church key bent.
I thought the spot of sun inside was a sailboat, loved
the traversing reflections, the zippity gleam, an enchanted door.

I think I willed myself to become abstract
(though I didn't know what that meant, it was the only way to enter)
I moved the can from angle to angle, followed the gold parallelogram
and again the triangle crawled inside that vessel and traveled
from one orange shore to another, flew further and farther

to a region where light teemed forever
like the place where the fireflies we chased at dusk
were born. My eye on the flashes, little armadas
that couldn't sink in the ocean inside the aluminum walls
of the new world, I saw it was endless

Not like the clothesline where my Mother stretched her freckled arms.
Not like the games the other kids played till the sky went amethyst
and their houses called from the mouths of their doors. In the glimmering
sloop of the can, I abandoned my brother, forgot
my lavender sunsuit, my bare feet and braided hair

For one long moment I coasted in the journeying bardo, lay down
in the curvature of the infinite
lit from within

like an orange is circular, globular, spinning
to nothing, nothing
but center.