While We're Here

You have never once been a visitor here.

You are the very body of Planet Earth.

You are the spinning sweep of improbabilities gone right,

made shapeless in the fleet of living substance-spent.

(Of course you look a little different in the mornings,

it’s been 1.6 million miles.

How lucky we are to be migratory birds of the cosmos,

without making any sort of leave at all.)

The universe makes our frailty proverbial: 93 billion light years of mostly-nothing-there-at-all.

(and by all of that cosmic-nothing-

deep-sixed by the stars in fifteen seconds!

how lamblike we are before the universe,

how she has yet to slaughter us.)

The body is made sweet by its own fugitive allowance.

It’s all so brief, for the time being. A million or so miles for a metamorphosis.

Stop mowing the lawn! Change is unrelenting.