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Scope
My father gifted me
with a microscope
when I was young and curious,
the kind that used a mirror to shoot
light up through the slide and eyepiece
illuminating small letters of life
into galactic epigrams:
the bristles on the cricket leg:
a grove of trees after the snow has melted.
The vascularity of an oak leaf:
a cartographer's conundrum.
The glinting scale of a goldfish:
the gilded shields of a phalanx.
Little did he know, as did I,
that I was learning poetry
which I later studied by looking
at sonnet-slides under microscope
where a single line was a city,
a single word a home,
and a single line break
the universe.
But before I had studied,
while I was still bright-eyed,
a friend graciously let me squint
through her telescope
one bright evening
this time at things which were so large
they gave off their own light
illuminating lens and my eyes
and this world,
breath-taking to see
the numinous so near
fitting into the cradle of my palm
the abstract condensed with personality,
a star perched like a bird on a manger.
And when I wrote, and when I write,
I have one eye in the telescope
and the other in the microscope,
which explains why poetry at times
feels like vertigo, rising and falling,
and trying to step away from this observatory,
I take a walk, muttering half-madly
into the wind that
poetry is life
and life is a word.
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