Space Walk

Outside the spacecraft tethered by barely a thread, the astronaut
swims in a sea of nothing far from any knowns, swaddled like an
infant must be, flung out for science, for discovery, for repairs. A
frontier, always what's next part of a grand adventure, home a
frangible concept ever-rippling outward with her, unmoored in
concentric circles. She's given herself to them, to the challenge,
sometimes horror to see so much so clearly where she floats in low
earth orbit traveling 28,000 kilometers per hour. An eerie stillness
circling Earth every ninety minutes, enormous planet suspended in spacetime
as she is suspended waiting to climb back aboard. Her
life, hurtling through that vacuum, not flat as the world was once

believed to be, even her DNA changing.

O celestial body, one of us, we peer beyond the edges of the cracked-
ceiling world acquainted with the dark, speeding toward uncertainty,

slipping the margins of time.

Quantum Leap

Startled bluebird swoop

from feeder to post what

wingbeats blueredblur how

describe that instant

between here and not

the jump itself minor

in time and space a shock

in existence not presence

nor absence an interlude

of being probable like between

systole and diastole call it

beating one nanosecond

begun at some point will

stop hand on my breast

not mechanical synapse

like thought the not

known before I write

the next word the birdfeeder

waits at the heart of the

Universe possibility hovers