back SARA ELIZA JOHNSON
Wormhole
structure linking separate points in space-time,
like a tunnel
Once the sky was still a blue membrane
that rippled over you, breathed
into you, when the forest was still
pine and clouds, so your hands
smelled of pine and clouds, trout scales
shining them for days.
Now the trees are shadows burned
into wind, as if frozen mid-implosion.
My hands won’t move
but my wrist vein wrinkles with a pulse
and I hear the blood
in the shadow I am in this forest:
all of us shadows in rows, growing like roots
down from the white lake of sky.
When my vision parts I see the other side:
seconds there like scales glittering
through a break in a river,
the forest there still growing arterial,
and I know the veins will meet
and merge, a transfusion of particles,
and there I will tear my body from its hold
and pull your body from the lake
and suck the blood from your lungs
and replace it with my breath
and clothe you in my skin,
which once was your shadow
cast across the path in the forest
we once walked together, two objects
impossibly colliding, a clot
in a rippling tunnel of wind.
Asteroseismology
Lazarus
Wormhole