Goodnight Dance

Even Tired You Dance Goodnight to Me L. Edgar Otto June 18, 2011

The mote of cottonwood seed floats
past my window, alone and far from the mother ship

It alights briefly on my screen, caught, bounced back
in the wind, one of tens of thousands and

Finding the earth rich, rejoices, buries deep into the grass
between our buildings, our windowpanes

I hear your spoon drop, flick the raindrops off
the squares they imprinted, compound eyes

We both out of focus, stops blurred close and far
steal glances, together how blue your eyes in high definition

You adjust your nightgown, lift to rub your breasts
casually as if I not seeing, they your belly to say goodnight

Why do you want this game at a distance, all you need
I free to give you, as we rise and fall to nowhere in the wind?

* * *

I awake early, how long the day this time of year, its peak. Our schedules match or maybe the storm of heavy rain got us started early. The window closed and yet the drops falling from the ceiling near it. A good night's sleep though short in an hour before sunrise what was true to the dream that your window lights up and the curtains and blinds open. The coffee not made and turn on before your shower and fussing with the endless choice of dress. Not the dawn where we need no light save that from the Venus belted sky and chance to see Mercury rise on the horizon.

Nothing on the television but infomercials. The radio talks of the world through Canada the BBC. Then as the sun rises and the windows dim, only a reflection from the sky and no internal light I take breakfast with you, then reach for the book of zero and infinity the nightlight of night owl theater over to read and write by the window- take a picture when the light is strong enough of the poem of last night open wide the ledge facing the window. You are used to me not seeing you when I am deep in thought or writing something down, trying to keep it casual, pretend I did not see you glancing up at me to see if I were near, we set in the rules and tired of the game of closing blinds as if in anger or feigned embarrassment.

The standard model looks a little thin today in the clarity of morning. It is a good plan and a cleaver one full of the mysteries with suggestions that make sense as to how the particles and gravity works, the count, the breaking of symmetry that one of the glue-lings is a color... the dance of vectors into quaternions or they into vectors beyond the pentads from the eight and the quantum field generators short of continuity, simple unity a complex beginning for the concrete and all the twists and turns some statement of space in all directions and each a unique direction sifted from the odd mixing of dreams where all things meet in the unity so many think is the five of natural space. It is not clear what they ask or if they have broken through at last to what is original in new physics and the details of the theory.

It is a start, it is a transcending of our long sleeping dreams where first we awakened to the pattern and yet have been confused and stuck there so many decades after the golden age of breakthroughs. I note that there are twenty five such generators, that is I draw the square roots and the mass values as to what is expected to be seen and why it a matter of square roots of the seven such that we may say this a fermion and perhaps the foundation of the rest or a boson- at least a formal difference some of the interpretations of particles do not quite respect in the cauldron of the stars or our costly hippodrome too soon it goes out into the vapor trail and sulfur smell, a sparkler to the delight of immortal children.

I vaguely recall trying to fit 25 patches on a click map in the grid of things that the simple numbers add up better- to make that step into the yet unknown and not to find closure in the theory nor the ghosts that posses the veterans from Vietnam who still wonder and cannot be welcomed home. Miss Liberty is a harsh mother who tries to impart wisdom through our guilt with her stars and stripes of gold.

So, I too find in the arithmetic some novel way to see the order, and as all who reach a little deeper at the dawn of a new theory try to extend it more to where it matters past the blood brain barrier into the new shadows and mirrors of physics, deeper into the ultimate secret of the nature of life itself. Clearly, in our duality and design we mammal eggs differentiate to the fifth power where the real game begins. That initiator on the genome code, and its terminator shadow mirror. How could they but whisper this as a foundation not so long ago or find some other more "rational" explanation. We see vaguely as if yet to develop, we embryos. We fairy rings that build into the sky and outward the worlds great cities that will cover the earth, we Atlas where Atlantis into ten parts sinks and crumbles under its own weight, but does the earth not always shrug?

So, if I were not a modest man I would laugh at the explanations- but not relish being caught in the rain and storm of time that we all have not foreseen how to hold the river in, find what is the inertia at the center of some world that determines the climate or that it is only a shaky thing the sun sends out its wind and rays before the quietness and chance again to breathe beyond its quickening.

* * *