Prologue to a Text

Clare Rossini

We humans once lived in the moment,

The moment being all there was. Stuffing our mouths

With berries, we collapsed on the ground to make

An early forerunner of love. Then wind

Brought the stink of a predator's haunch, panic

Ensuing. How divine it must have seemed

When, at last, we had time to ponder clouds

As they built their chateaus. Grunts into words,

Words into the updraft of questions --

A miracle to carry the world

On the tongue: "world." Even the heart at last

Consigning itself to syllables: Ah, thee....

The numbers tidying things up, the numbers

Knitting things to equations, the theorems

Proposing, revising, secreting, each

Tool-in-theory awaiting our genius,

Our heartache, until damp and wood-colored,

This morning dawned, the smell of burning leaves

Drifting across my sepia mood,

Every doorway in the house yawning empty.

You, elsewhere, lift a screen in the air (Got it!)

Then send an image toward the chill

Draughts of space. It flickers through a satellite, free-

Falls back to the planet

-- Let's pause for a moment, behold earth

Cloud-swaddled, gamboling around our star....

Somewhere in New Jersey, a tower corrals

Your cache of photons, beams them on

To the privacy of my circuits, which are roused

By your elation: Check out this sunset,

Love! A finger to the warm flesh of glass,

And my screen goes bronze with a Roman dusk.