Letter To A Poet, poem by Jeanne Walker
Midnight ticks in a quiet lab around
one sleepy dork who, suddenly sits up,
hearing two black holes larger
than Manhattan as they merge to one
unimaginably extreme black nothing
which happened before dinosaurs
emitted their first roar, though
the sound barely finds
him at him lonely post, where he
has strained for years to hear the ping
of spacetime, which he imagines
as the chime of God's champagne
glass when He rested on the seventh
day. That far away, that long
ago, it was--like the murmur from
time's beginning--the letter delivered
last week to me. Inexplicable, the return
address: Great Meadows Correctional Facility,
so carefully hand-printed by a stranger
Anthony Burton I.D. # 72A9123
who asked me nothing but to recognize
he is.
Jeanne Murray Walker has published a number of volumes of poetry. The poem above appeared in Issue 17 of Cleaver Magazine.
one sleepy dork who, suddenly sits up,
hearing two black holes larger
than Manhattan as they merge to one
unimaginably extreme black nothing
which happened before dinosaurs
emitted their first roar, though
the sound barely finds
him at him lonely post, where he
has strained for years to hear the ping
of spacetime, which he imagines
as the chime of God's champagne
glass when He rested on the seventh
day. That far away, that long
ago, it was--like the murmur from
time's beginning--the letter delivered
last week to me. Inexplicable, the return
address: Great Meadows Correctional Facility,
so carefully hand-printed by a stranger
Anthony Burton I.D. # 72A9123
who asked me nothing but to recognize
he is.
Jeanne Murray Walker has published a number of volumes of poetry. The poem above appeared in Issue 17 of Cleaver Magazine.
