Supernova and The Strongest Muscle in the Body
To the memory of Kurt Brown, great teacher and champion of poetry
SUPERNOVA
When Betelgeuse turns supernova two suns
will rise each morning set each night though “night”
will be a matter of the clock and not the light
here on earth secret numbers have been detected
in the painted eye of Mona Lisa put there perhaps
by Da Vinci himself though no one knows for sure
when I was twenty one I lay on a beach in Connecticut
and stared into the eye of my lover while she
lay beside me on a towel on the sand and stared back
later she would betray me though I would go on loving her
for years long after whatever we had faded
all over the world birds are falling out of the sky
and a hundred thousand crabs have washed up on the beaches
of southern England begging a question we fear to ask
Da Vinci knew beauty but a supernova might result
in a black hole 1300 light years from earth
when Betelgeuse loses mass then collapses into itself and explodes
mass animal deaths are not unusual though they don’t
normally occur so close to one another in Wisconsin
two hundred cattle dropped dead in an icy field at the same time
first pain then numbness the heart imploding on itself
more likely earth will be showered with particles called neutrinos
that have no electric charge and can pass through
matter at the speed of light without affecting or being affected by it
because it’s possible our bodies remember what our minds forget
the way an ancient stone remembers the fern pressed into it
while these particles will pass through us
and through the Earth without the slightest agitation or harm
THE STRONGEST MUSCLE IN THE BODY
is not the heart, but the tongue. This comes as no surprise,
seeing as how we chatter about everything and nothing.
My mother talked incessantly, talked to fill the silence,
any silence that might occur during conversation,
a steady stream of words that both riled and consoled me,
one thing leading to another as in a poem
or a trapeze artist letting go of one ring to grab
another just in time to keep gravity from dumping them
into a void before colliding with the earth below.
The heart, we say, is breakable like good China,
brittle and sweet as candy which we give away
or someone steals, and we fall in love without a net
something I’ve done too many times as the crowd,
aghast at first, then bored, turned away and I lay crushed
until the next show, more than ready to perform
again. I think my mother battered me
with so much talk I became a bad listener,
someone whose eyes glaze over when you speak to them.
And I think the silence in which she now rests
is what she feared, and she spoke, not out of mindlessness,
but from her heart which had been tossed back
and forth a number of times and finally cracked
like the pattern on her China—an old man crossing
a bridge, speechless with wisdom, knowing nothing lasts.
—
Kurt Brown
Kurt Brown founded the Aspen Writers’ Conference, and Writers’ Conferences & Centers. He is the author of six chapbooks and six full-length collections of poetry, including his newest Time-Bound, due out from Tiger Bark Press in 2013. He was an editor for the online journal MEAD: The Magazine of Literature and Libations and edited ten anthologies of poetry, including his newest (with Harold Schechter) Killer Verse: Poems about Murder and Mayhem. His memoir, Lost Sheep: A Portrait of Aspen in the 70s, was published by Conundrum Press in 2012. He taught for many years at Sarah Lawrence College. He passed away in Santa Barbara, CA in June of 2013.