Soapbox

This morning, because I had to be sure,
I crept out onto the back porch and watched the rebirth of  the day,
It's a common and gradual miracle that
most of us prefer to sleep through,
counting on the sun to make its entrance
without any help from an cheering section.
But today, sensing it might be a near thing, I had to be sure.
Tree branches rose black against the brightening horizon
like the witch-fingers of night trying to claw the rising blue
back down to the ochre edge of the world
but the sun won it's freedom once again.

I stood, toes curled under
to protect my bare feet from the cold floorboards
and arms wrapped tightly across my chest
to keep myself from flying apart too fast.
I could already tell it was going to be one of those days
when everything in the universe seems to be flying apart too fast.

And where are they off to, these bits of me so eager to leave?
Are they looking for you
and other parts of their original self?
I know that we are all the same primal stuff, 
you and I, and a rhinoceros and an asteroid-
just specks of a shattered cosmos imagining ourselves unique
each turning our own tiny steps
in the  molecular dance of combination,
dissolution and recombination.

Once matter has been connected, even after it separates,
the energy remains joined
which I guess is why my electrons continue humming your tune,
photons in harmony, quantum tuning forks,
energy in slow vibrational dance.
No wonder my fingertips tingle when I think of you.

But "Now" only has meaning
when it observes its reflection the looking glass of "then"
and I have no solid shape without your gravitational pull.
Our past, present and future, united in superposition of possibilities,
are always apart and forever together.
This imagination of self is a vanity, for
I am as unique as a snowflake in a blizzard,
different, yes, yet irrelevant without the whole.
What we call individuality is merely  a season.
I am deja dreamed a thousand times ago and since
and each time, always, a part of me is you.
Like Schroedinger, afraid to look at his own cat
for fear of killing it
I know that, as long as I avert my eyes
you can be both alive and dead, past and present,
here and gone, all in one.
And rather than make you choose I let my gaze slide away
from your books on the shelf, you coat in the closet,
focus instead, on the altitude of the sun
and whether or not the moon will make it home tonight.