BPR 47 | 2020
It never was anything but pieces of what we’ve thought
to value: gold, pearls, church music among the spheres.
And of course the people we loved here,
whole again and ready to sit and talk
over a drink of an enhanced elixir.
Perhaps a child we knew shows up, utterly himself.
Or the mother young as when we sat to listen
to Bible stories we swallowed whole, like medicine.
We’ve thought we might relive, in a high somewhere,
the day of a reward, prizes won, applause,
a farther future in the same shape going on
with everything in it, only spotless.
More likely is the Nothing, nothing at all,
the simplicity that terrifies, the killer punch—
although it did become the Cosmos, once.