January 5th: Perihelion

first poem of 2020

 

If I climbed to the summit of Chimborazo;

at midday on Perihelion, nobody on earth

would be closer than I, to the center

of anyone’s sun. Not yours, not mine.

I would stretch these fingers

towards the legend of your map,

the key to the rivers and mesas

and snow-capped volcanoes of your life.

 

This week, my country set fire

to a nation;

man’s insatiable gluttony set fire

to a continent; the sun is burning the Andes

in perihelion and neglecting Lake Baikal;

and I could sit under the world’s oldest

planted tree for 40 more hours

or 40 days or weeks, and still understand

either you or the rest of us

any more than I did yesterday.

 

I wanted you to also set me on fire,

I wanted to find my own angry molten core,

the nucleus of all power,

calculated fission; a splitting

of beliefs and concepts reaching

other worlds years after our own story

burns out like cinder, like ash; like

burned landscapes in the outback,

like a missile strike. Tell me, please,

you do not belong in a cruel world

but we are not cruel people

and maybe you belong here, with me.

 

The world can feed me its lies

for 40 years and still never convince me

to hate along with it; you will never find me

waving a flag of war because someone

else wears something different on their head

than I do. I can also never not love you,

with the same ferocity of the corona

painting its bloody story on the snows

of Chimborazo.

I cannot yet assimilate the enormity

of what the world is enduring

at its greatest ecologic horror cinema;

 

I cannot undo the blunder

of political morons

any more than I can ever be what I

am not- neither stop loving the entire

world nor not longing

for you; these things cannot be exchanged

one for the other. Could I ever not

want the sun itself to climb down

and tell me in his own words,

dear you are not of your world, but

maybe, you were made of mine? I would

share her words with only you,

my greatest love; I do not fit in here

but this body still burns in the midday

glare of electrons and waves,

snow and fire in perfect perihelion,

 

and I will never apologize to anyone again

about either my love for the fragile

and terrible things

of the planet, or of the fragile

and terrifying things we alight

in each other.

 

Author's Note

Perihelion: the point of earth's orbit when it is physically closest to the sun
Chimborazo: a 20,000+ volcano in Ecuador, its summit is the point on earth furthest from the center of the core