Tony Nozero © 2010 All Rights Reserved
Tony Nozero © 2010 All Rights Reserved
A Thousand Words
Time is what prevents everything
from happening at once. –John Wheeler
In this “participatory universe”
we make our way, fast burning stars, stars
in contraction, through spheres
of what is given, a white dwarf’s
diminishing spin, forbearance of an ox.
Subject to weather, we whirl within
fields of unseen systems, uncanny
familiars in unfamiliar places, ash of atoms
on our skins, no end
but the “faint blue fragment
lapsing” in sight.
And yet – confusion of shoreline,
illusion of frame, black holes
swallowing light, throwing off stars
like sparks from a grindstone –
we are
never the mean but instances,
interactions of verbs,
every word a parable
delivered at the speed of speech,
vectors of sensation
as vulnerable as thought,
definitions that complicate
with valence, variants,
grasshoppers in the envelope.
John’s poems have appeared in the Comstock Review and Boxcar. He lives in Petaluma, CA, where he works as a physical therapist assistant and teaches fall prevention classes for older adults.