Eris                                                                                                                                                                Cole McKeith

 

“To the most beautiful,”

 

Now, estranged as among heavenly bodies,

I know in recess what is unknown in excess:

 

Two bodies dropped are alike in descent,

falling to Earth at each other’s side.

And one will shatter in the dust;

it has no heart to bind its exteriors.

But the other, which ends its fall as its twin meets the dirt,

will shatter and sunder the face of the Earth.

 

Air is only a medium, like water or time.

There is no peril in gravity,

no fears among planetary masses,

whose faces storm with the fever

of a heart they did not choose.

Breathless—fated and unfree.

 

Deathly fear is unique to the bodies between saltwater bodies.

Those born under the weight of oceans, at last,

were inheritors of the Earth, heiresses of the sky.

And breathing—fated, unfree, and afraid,

in fleeting intervals of deathly panic,

lifted, as in air, to the danger of their condition.

 

Time strains the tension among the sinews of my heart,

who lessen their grip as the forces of gravity;

the distances drawn on the fringes of darkness

—as eons from genesis, removed from the Sun—

have not wholly severed our connections,

but thread their sundered fragments.

 

And broken, I know the broken and whole.

I know the sound of hollowness,

the echoes of shallow spaces.

Distance is no severance of gravity;

the spheres have not diminished their mass

dispersing substance into shells.

 

Speak in the aspect of Earthly bodies

impoverished of the climaxes of their descent.

Speak in the edges of lighting

and every fracture inflicted in the air,

to render a height to the ends of its fall,

from the small to the great, and the great to the small.

 

As wars seeded in thoughtless wrappings, addressed,

“To the best among you all.”