They use assiduously their given time,
Some texts say twenty-four hours,
Others ten or twelve. In World War I
When flying was novel enough
That bombs were dropped by the pilot's own hand,
My grandfather, watching from above,
Tried to follow their graceless descent
Tracing the long golden section described
Till they flashed, white and silent,
The way serotonin does
On some hillside of the brain.
Later at the university, when he taught
How the wide array of the animal kingdom
Flew, crawled, or swam themselves
Toward the unseen glory
That willed their locomotion,
He spoke of the mayfly, how its heart
Was proportionately the same size
As the human's and beat
In such furious synch with the blurred wings
It could, were it large enough, induce seizure
In an epileptic. Such timing, he explained,
Allowed a machine gun to be mounted
On the nose of a biplane
And never shoot its own propellers.
The mayfly, if extrapolated to human terms,
Would live to be eighty.
It is the first cool night of autumn, 1964.
My grandfather tells me
There is less space between the two stars
That float above us like shy teenagers
Than between any two electrons
Whirling within the heart.
This, I think, is how love works--
Were I to ride light, like some angelic
And fevered horse, the great arc of space
Like the shell of the tortoise that holds the world,
Would forever bring me back here to myself.
And I think I understand--how a circuit once completed
Has no beginning nor end and we, like Zeno's runner,
Live forever between here and there, between the lubb and the dubb
Of the beating heart, arising once and always,
Like Jesus, incorruptible, from the cave. And all around us
The air is hushed but for two crickets
Calling back and forth, tiny and splendid,
Across the chilling night. |
—Zeno's dichotomy