Dani Couture
“De proche en proche, votre science mettra notre espèce à l’abri…”
— J.-H. Rosny aîné (Joseph Henri Honoré Boex), Les Navigateurs de l’infini
Witness to a bloom of false jellies that alternate
between yellow
smiley face Thank Yous and black Come Agains.
Moulds’
positives released to their new wild gyre.
Inland, a roughed-up stuffed
animal forgotten in ’83 Pizza Hut now as buried
as any body
even if the weather has been digging up graves.
Eras cycle,
float down washed out highways. A soft
lashing
against your leg says you have lost
an understanding
of your surroundings and cannot go back.
What feels like
a small death is only a tolling carillon’s
passing attention.
A blister. A moment in the key of minor. The index
of our refraction
is negligible but enough for you to believe
we’re still evolving
or able to change even basic habits. Forgetting to
lock the front door,
or learning to forget. Our lifecycles
are hardly understood
in comparison to X — the variable we have
not yet discovered
but expect to listen to Chuck Berry.
We’re growing
through one another like finger traps
and will soon
turn 200 with minimal consequence.
Still, recalcitrant
Earth may one day buck us toward
the closest passable exo.
No matter, we’re heavy, require launching,
are many.
We have our time, if not the time
of others. Tonight,
we remain here, waterlogged with cured
nostalgia.
Our memories revealed by salt and suspended
in gelatin.
Some improvised, analog, carved into gold
fired interstellar.
Sit with me. The math of tonight’s half light,
heaven’s melted
plastics, renders us moderately more attractive,
which, in part,
keeps us breeding to extend the thoughts
we’ve been thinking.
To date, I’ve come to understand
humans
like photos of themselves, like their pasts
— taken
at a distance. At a midpoint
and mistakable.
Allowing one to consider that it could have
gone a different way.
And possibly did or will. You waking up
instead
of waking down to the next forty years,
which is now
the past forty years. It’s been so long
since we visited
the moon, every archival photo looks taken
from a single road trip
we based our entire lives on.
Yesterday,
I purchased a second-hand tin of old
photographs
and tried to understand them as Boex’s
waning Tripèdes.
But it’s too late. By the time you tell someone
to look
at the harvest moon, it’s reduced, gone plain
as any other night.
Photo by Roberta Baker
Dani Couture is the author of three collections of poetry and the novel Algoma (Invisible Publishing). Sweet (Pedlar Press) was nominated for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry and won the ReLit Award. Her most recent collection of poetry is Yaw (Mansfield Press).
