101412PARALLAX
per aspera, ad astra.












to the angel of the halls of time:

          in the space of those untold-thousand terminal
          heartbeats silent; the treetop sunbeams gliding
          some forest thaw in spring where he was static
          bled like ruin and heather in the cloudshperes

          she danced not far, and whether or not she felt
          the dynamic of weathered-storm skyshallow, yet
          untired he moved to make not a sound and thus
          was fashioned the beginning of an end

          sometime in the past, wherewith all things were
          one, it seemed like it would only be forever from
          there on in (and upon reflection he succeeded in
          little but a pained sense of tragedy over time)


to the angel of the halls of space:


          that the air was seething with the instabilities of
          all quantum spacetime, there was no doubt, she
          could not help but observe the irregular edge of
          the new-fallen night stars

          and he pocketed the least of these, that she may
          never know, understood to be the finest jewels in
          his creation, understood to lie not far from a solid
          white-hot mass of emotive supercore

          he forged a world of pearled unicorns and delicate
          dragonwing scales, a shining sea to cross by ship,
          a forest of sad illusions, a vast sky of ink black and
          a star for each "i love you" never spoken out loud


to the angel of the spoken word:


          in transmission, much was lost of these things
          a parched tale for weary hearts, suddenly forgiven
          and disparate.  the unearthly dying of tissue never
          much to prevent the unavoidable separation of..

          look up to the stars;  curious and estranged - he is
          there, even as we oft accept things seen only with
          our eyes. thus either faith or science, to accept the
          inevitable drifting of bodies through the empty.

          could he be numb to the bite of space, as now the
          world has fallen away?  as there are naught here
          but rapid meteorites and space-channel static, she
          is (again) nowhere to be seen this side of the sun


to the angel of safe keeping:


          he in the quiet warmth of memory fragmentation
          a frail presence, once essential as food or water
          she stands in the stain of blood-on-grass, where
          once long ago he loved, yet loved not.

          but ghost-lights in the towers dimly shone as the
          sun went down on ivory hill, and from the farthest
          of horizons she came on an errand of the winds,
          sun-stained, she; formless and void

          grounded (somewhat) to the metal earth he was,
          and in that void found he such a home where (for
          fear of soon forgotten) placed within such as he
          could from what remained of his heart-strewn


to the angel of the magnetic fields:


          sad, then, she woke from the supercoil sunrise,
          he, embedded in the polar current, then spoke
          again of love, and not the ebb and flow of time
          as was the custom in those days

          while she moved on to other worlds, somewhat
          causing a vast distance to emerge in-between,
          he chained himself to the tree of life, and there
          remained (held fast, as it were) until finally

          scores of life-spans later, fissures in the earth's
          fragile crust caused his departure: at the edge
          of a dying world, he fell through into space and
          tasted the sweet of a collapsing magnetic field


to the angel of the sky and stars:


          to stay above, to look down from high orbit on
          some forest thaw in spring where he was static
          bled like ruin and heather in the cloudshperes,
          and shell-shocked, he, never to know the "why"

          in deep untired, and makes he not yet a sound
          drifting space-gloves undying and helmet shine
          while left to navigate the final resting places of
          every splintered thought and broken heart

          for want, for the thousand things one would die
          for, and the one thing for which to live. and write
          like there will be no tomorrows, a parallel to life
          itself, she might have said: per aspera, ad astra.





















© 2004 jesse michael renaud