Witness

The small sweep of lives, the orbit

of gravel on string, moons as white
as unused pillows, the infinite
squeezed into tiny and tight,

 

as tense as a crude catapult 

in the hands of giddy adolescents.
A supreme nothingness result
from minute spasms of moments.

 

What else can I have witnessed?

Whole galaxies stripped bare,
an entire eternity undressed
a white hot radioactive flare;

 

and then all has gone ominous

the silence swells with its own ring
that can’t be shared between us
with the same degree of meaning -

 

like peanuts from a packet

while watching a furtive movie
scenes and seats heavily padded
with a raucous ambiguity -

 

and so I’ve have come back to it,

back to the small sweep and sphere,
shrunk, flung back into these orbits
of my lives and my gravel here.

 

No-one ever speaks anything

a languid angst burns up space
and keeps the moon from yellowing
nudges the status quo into place

 

keeps the gravel turning around

fingers of centrifugal force
and skims meanings off sounds
and ruffles pages to find their source;

 

but the meanings can’t be made

by turns of page, by the swivel
of stone and clock, empty decayed
stars in their tracks. The lights shrivel,

 

while you witness the same events

and even call them similar names
and yet the meanings fall different,
haphazard, and nothing’s the same.

 

 

Beyond the one-dimensional

silence and its disconnects
there’s no orbit that threads it equal
smoothes the jerking, turns defects

 

into a light-hearted anecdote

shared on cocktail-cold evenings
“this I’ve written, just a small note
on catapults and sundry things,”

 

with a deprecatory shrug.

The hesitation and the fear;
the difference, much-abused drug,
mutes the impulse, we quietly steer

 

the moment away and each

smile a little uncertainly
understanding sways out of reach
neither of us can quite break free

 

to enable a common template

for catastrophes we witness.
We spin at our co-ordinates
once or twice we snatch a guess

 

look through the other’s lens

feel the other’s pebble and string
there is a tiny flash of sense
and then we are back to nothing.

 

The night trickles a little colder

now the moon’s a wrinkled pillow
hard as rock against shoulders
there’s nothing to be said, we know

 

the limits to word definitions

each perspective sharp, fine tuned
to what’s been seen, done, and undone
but in the end, mired and marooned

 

within our own discrete islands

of silent helplessness, tongue-tied;
turn away and understand
perspectives rarely coincide.

 

And that too is fine, my friend

that we could not articulate
all that we’ve seen, all that’s happened
that we can only stand and wait

 

watch and serve just one purpose

without any gods to oversee
that we each stood up to witness
the lexicons of plurality.