We peer furtively at smiles, bent wrists
and it smacks of mortality.
We imagine—nebulae in the irises
of a stranger, like they bear stories
waiting for the optimum mass
of hydrogen, us counting on fusion.
The wish to witness the immortal
is a prayer written by the finite.
A folly—we are born into time,
but construct our yearnings
for beyond it, the smile now an
impetus for entanglement, the wrist
the crest of a wave to take at leisure.
I had miscalculated in the past—
tagged luminous beginnings
where instead were clusters
of dying stars, a cornea clouded by defect.
Trained my sight across a wrist which,
in the end, rushed back to the ocean,
never to return the same wave it was.
The way I made much
of a smile, a bent wrist
smacks of ignorance. Because
you are not just your smile,
or your wrist, or your eyes.
You are mathematical, a galaxy
spinning your way through time,
with your forces, and your vacui,
and I am fortunate to derive.
