Random Acts of Poetry: The Box

Random Acts of Poetry

The Box

The odor of time
becomes the basement air,
a sticky smell
of rotting sci-fi books
and unsettled dust
that catches in the webs
at filmy windows.
I give in to the past,
look into the box,

tear open a rip
between here and then,
find my fleeting way back
in a photo buried
among musty coats
and yellowed clippings—
my own face, age sixteen.
I touch an untouchable
artifact of unknowing.

The creatures on Centauri B
see each star’s arc
from birth to destination.
They see the sky’s
net of shining strings.
They see
people like centipedes--
a fetus at one end,
Methuselah the other.