The Big Room
Or an
evening walk in the rhyming universe
The evening sky brightens
outside, and draws light from my room.
The dogs, impatient at my
feet, want to move, let’s leave this tomb.
I laugh, is the workday through?
Their leashes on, and mine, undone,
we step into the outer room,
now the realm of the setting sun.
It’s eventide, half-summer,
as we step into the gloaming,
into that room with no
ceiling, the three of us go roaming.
Into the warm quiet
nightfall, we enter this swirling place.
Leaving our home, my dogs
take me on a trip through time and space.
The fading light is
stealing, background radiation, fleeing,
new stars and planets are
appearing, pearls in a pink champagne sea.
As the swirling sky
darkens, what’s left still ignites my brain.
It leaves me with this
feeling, our familiar world is strange.
It looks as if I’m standing
on the edge of an open field.
It looks like a man with two
dogs – instead the infinite, revealed.
I feel the arrow of time,
the sky aquiver with twilight.
My hand draws the bow of
the Archer, his dart flies across the night.
In this room, my hand can reach to the edge of space and beyond.
From me to that star, I
could skip a stone across this pond.
Can my spirit bear the
lightness of The All within my reach?
Yet here I am, in the big
room, dizzy, with dogs at my feet.
Overhead, there to the
right, shines Vega, Mister Sagan’s star.
He had a billion or two to
share, but this one was the door.
Twenty-five light years, a
short step away, Contact was the book,
where Ms. Foster met her
Dad, or an alien with a kindly look.
How can all this be so
welcoming? It could squash me like a bug.
But it doesn’t seem so
inclined – somehow it feels more like a hug.
A hadron glow still warms
the sky, and the worlds around each star.
The radiation might be
dangerous, but still, it warms my heart.
Summer solstice, June 2017, North Andover, Mass.
Copyright Mark Bohrer
