Our Velocity At 2.73 Degrees Kelvin ...per che l’ombra sorrise e si ritrasse Dante, Purgatorio II.83 You cannot see it moving over the slick-rock face, or in moonlight hear the way the tousled cornsilk sighs. You cannot feel it lift the nape-hairs of your dream but there it is beside you always, the slow heat of living, moving along at precisely the velocity of your downwind reach. Looking backward from the bleeding edge of time, we must appear to be, relatively speaking, smack at time’s dead center, so swiftly swells this tidal diastole, yet we can only just approach that always vanishing place across a fast-diminishing, a never-quite-closing, distance. At the middle of things, I imagine a swift house, a busy airport terminal, all motion, all polished granite, steel and glass, and in its midst The Deity Herself perhaps, a slender girl in a crisp unwrinkled Burberry jacket who doesn’t seem to recognize you as you approach, and when, arms spread wide, you offer the customary embrace, she takes a startled half-step back.
DB Jonas is an orchardist living in the Sangre de Cristo mountains of northern New Mexico. His work has appeared in Neologism, Consilience Journal, PoeticaMagazine and The Jewish Literary Journal, and is forthcoming in Tar River, Innisfree and The Deronda Review.
Amethyst Review 