anything

NOTHING

Between Buck Owens and Vivaldi what’s left

to listen to but the stars, so I do, dialing

the radio down to indeterminate static,

what I always thought was absence, an aria

of sizzling nothingness. Instead

it’s the Milky Way radiating arrhythmia

all the way back. It’s gossip

of the vacuum. That nothing has never been

truly nothing is why I believe,

even still, in love. Beside two rivers

I have lived nearly all my life

and these beneath one sky

muttering its endless alphabet of sine waves.

Jupiter with its flock of moons

and the stone from which we hope

to squeeze one drop of water,

red Mars pulsing in the blank field of night—

I’ve wanted to leave Earth

behind, gravity’s orphan at last,

but not Earth with its two good seasons and two bad

and not its angel-winged clams

luminous in the mud bed of a river

so distant from me

I can’t remember where

that water is, except that I’ve dreamed it,

except that in it I sank

all the way down.