PATRICK WRIGHT

Metanoia

This is not your destruction— 
                        	       For a star to ignite its centre & shower the vacuum 
with light, remember a cloud must first collapse & go on 
                                    		                                                      collapsing 
like a breakdown. 
                               No, not madness—torn apart by change     
tin soldiers melt & form a heart, now laying in a hearth 
 			                                   like a cinder from the Wormwood Star.
I can’t stop thinking of Oppenheimer & a blast radius 
                                    	                     mannequins scorched in a paper town. 
I can’t seem to transform myself— 
                                       	                I learned the first law of thermodynamics
believed in retrograde, you’d return like a meteorite 
                  that tumbles through sleep, dissolves on impact.     
                                                   Don’t ask me to find meaning in Cassiopeia 
I can’t share your eyes—the stars: pinholes through a tarp.  
                                        Why do parts of a galaxy spin at the same speed? 
            	                                                                 God—please tell me 
glial cells are the brain’s dark matter—the sun’s tilt 
                        	                                                       through a star field 
is more than the elliptic 
                            & from Mauna Kea there’s such a thing as omens at least.
I think of robots deserting us 
            	                           at a distance—& in this paint, the stellar debris.