LIGHT Comments

It puffed up our brains -
a bicycle-pump pressure down rubbery cords.
One hundred and eighty-six thousand
miles per second.

Dolphin has no such constancy,
hears like soup. Its grey-blue steel
jerks into air, makes children gasp.
Dolphin hoops the water - each leap
equal to its aether.

On the west coast I dug
for potatoes. Light there took its time
to gather, took time to roll in
its hard-earned pillows of dark.

Our Enlightenment boys
ply the radioactive, black-goggled
in the bomb-burst. They squint past embers
at the rim of the universe, urgent
for the one dark thing.

Already they catch it, condense it,
flourish it across the benchtop
like a royal flush. Bounce it off the cheek
of the moon. Make it check itself -
snitch on the slightest anomaly. Back
and forth, the caged exactitude.

It's the one constant, they said.
Let us build all space, all time, all
knowledge around it.

But the dolphin. The filed
white teeth, its white life.
It has missed the tide.
The fish-mammal is beached, flesh
desiccating in iridescent decay.
Its shrill scrimshaws to the marrow.

The children think it is smiling.
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