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.