It's Still Life

A Liturgy for the Bubble in a Current

Once upon a time

We gathered at water’s edge,
in a jacuzzi between the spoken
and the dissolved.

We knew when a metaphor was not a metaphor,
but a bubble wearing a skin of air,

and we spoke to the Brief Republic,
the Spinning Borders,
the diamond thinning to memory.
We called it a Bubble.

Of Politics and Breath

Observe the world beyond this water:
the great, grim theatre of nations.
Where coups dress in the vestments of civics,
and words are steam,
visible,
fervent,
but insubstantial —
ghosts without a ballot.

We were orators of the ephemeral,
and so, we choose the jacuzzi’s warm, churning sea.
We were a sovereign state of air,
a perfect, trembling sphere.
Our constitution was surface tension.
Our diplomacy was reflection.
We were a spinning arc on the surface.

We practice opening.
We practice shutting.
We were a whole, complete world,
for as long as the water allowed.

Of Feet and Time’s Teeth

Remember: it was flat feet
that spared Einstein the uniform.
A fact.
A bodily truth that altered destiny’s thought.

So too, on the pool’s edge,
a small boy folds in on itself.
The grief is not metaphorical.
Time has teeth, sharp and scheduled.
It bites in two days.
It takes a promised presence
and makes it an absence.
This is the gravity within our spinning sphere.
This is heat at the core of our brief republic.

Of Doors That Walk and Light That Arrives

This is The Doctrine of Consolation,
spoken into the salt-air of loss:

Endings are not walls.
They are doors that learned to walk.
Life is a relentless tutor of goodbye.

But know this, my small sovereign on the brink:
Life is a hoarder of hellos.
It stockpiles them in sunbeams,
in returning currents,
in the next breath after the sob.

Look there.
Look where the light keeps arriving.
It is the only commandment: Look.

Of Loosening and Knowing

And that bubble,
see how it is loosened from its own skin.

It is not destroyed,
but liberated into the laugh of the current.
It is lifted.
It is lost.
It becomes a jewel,
a diamond forged from water and sun,
a brilliance that is transient.

It moves too far.
It moves too fast.
Its borders grow thin,
a film stretching toward a transparency
indistinguishable from the sky.
This is not tragedy.
This is the moment of ultimate knowing.
This is exactly how a bubble learns what it is.

The Reveal

Go into this world of steam and teeth.
Spin your borders with courage.

Weep at the bite of time,
then look for the arriving light.
And when the current takes me,
when I am lifted,
lost,
and diamonded,
I will not fear the thinning.

It is the final,
graceful act of a returning sovereignty to the universe.
It is the hello
whispered within my goodbye.

We are perfect spheres,
and I am the memory of light on water.