Prologue to a Text

Clare Rossini

We humans once lived in the moment, 

 The moment being all there was. Stuffing our mouths 

With berries, we collapsed on the ground to make 

 An early forerunner of love. Then wind 

Brought the stink of a predator's haunch, panic 

 Ensuing. How divine it must have seemed 

When, at last, we had time to ponder clouds 

 As they built their chateaus. Grunts into words, 

Words into the updraft of questions --

 A miracle to carry the world 

On the tongue: "world." Even the heart at last 

 Consigning itself to syllables: Ah, thee.... 

The numbers tidying things up, the numbers 

 Knitting things to equations, the theorems 

Proposing, revising, secreting, each 

 Tool-in-theory awaiting our genius, 

Our heartache, until damp and wood-colored, 

 This morning dawned, the smell of burning leaves 

Drifting across my sepia mood, 

 Every doorway in the house yawning empty. 

You, elsewhere, lift a screen in the air (Got it!) 

 Then send an image toward the chill 

Draughts of space. It flickers through a satellite, free-

 Falls back to the planet 

 -- Let's pause for a moment, behold earth 

 Cloud-swaddled, gamboling around our star.... 

Somewhere in New Jersey, a tower corrals 

 Your cache of photons, beams them on 

To the privacy of my circuits, which are roused 

 By your elation: Check out this sunset, 

Love! A finger to the warm flesh of glass,

 And my screen goes bronze with a Roman dusk.