Space Divides

if Spirits embrace

Total they mix

PARADISE LOST, Book vit

When Milton's angels merge in love,

A single mixture, air with air,

They are one pure and pulsing space.

Our undulations are of earth.

Rooted and ravenous, tongue to tongue,

When our earths quake, we are two earths.

Despair distorts the abstract face,

As if we, each a Satan, plunge,

Celestial bodies, into hell,

And gaze back once toward paradise.

So the occasion comes. And goes.

We part: two earths fall side by side,

And each, from an earthen solitude,

Speaks words of air that pulse in air

From tongue to ear. True or untrue,

Believed or not, words no more mix

Than bodies do. They move in space,

Galactic and bare, that stays between

Us, always, certain as a stone,

Though with no substance of its own.