That Extraordinary Mote of Dust
That’s us—a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam—Carl Sagan
as I return to the mesa from a pilgrimage to Prague where the Astronomical Clock is
swaddled in scrim I am in love with Kafka as much as I was at nineteen an irresistible
voice that deepens my life the thrilling discovery of his sketches my body a conduit
butterfly wings quickening me down the cobblestone lanes inside the pale of the castle
we left migrating hummers outside the bedroom we left flannel sheets on the bed
and finches in the backyard and returned to nesting towhees and quail strutting on
the fire anthills like they own the horizon alight with wildfires around the entire
bowl’s rim yet the birds are trilling reborn by overflowing well-water in their basins
I am awed by how life can arise on a planet as long as water is present
the miracle of something so complex something so unlikely to happen and the possibility
that given the required exact right circumstances anything could happen I hold
faith in Hezekiah’s multifaceted orb as it bobbles down the hill my choice of one facet
leading to certain possibilities and then the next plane opens to a certain more but
given the incline no choice can ever lead back to those that were bypassed
this mesa is where I will spend my days as I wrap myself in the tick of the copper clock
time measured instead by the sequencing of the sun a metronomic movement
described by winter’s grasping at warmth followed by the summer shunning of heat
and always the pitfall of endeavoring to hold the spheres still
Demise of a Star
I knew a girl once I knew a girl once who glided into a black hole and as posited by Albert Einstein
slid beyond the event horizon the place of no return space-time collapsing
and that young girl from Latvia evanesced the matter that she was too much matter
for the small space that she occupied just a young girl from Latvia her family’s tree of life
budding over America flowering immigrant dreams in a sometimes-inhospitable land
a land in which even being blond and blue-eyed and smart could not save you from
derision if you lived on the wrong side of the river and our parents not wanting to talk about it
lectured us about the wrong thing lectured us about staying away from the frozen edges
the Merrimack River rushing through the center of our once-industrial town
powering the mills in which all new immigrants had been pressed into piecework
the city’s more established haves settling on one riverside new have-nots on the other
this Latvian family with means mistakenly choosing the wrong side as if any parents’
words or choices could keep any of us safe as if black holes were a thing outside of us
instead of the beast within our fourteen-year-old selves tortured monstrously
by otherness she had a deaf twin this young Latvian girl a sister we did not know
because in the mid-century there was no place in neighborhood schools for those who were
different and so Daryl would footslog along the river wind rattling the birches each day leaving
half of herself behind to sit in the row of wooden desks with a group of bullying strangers
the most slippery moment arriving with the Iowa Test she scored highest in the grade
which spotlighted her gave her the gift of more ridicule and rejection and so
is it any wonder that she chose the black hole the ice snapping under her feet
the wind scraping her face but I did wonder for decades she being the first
I knew to choose that black oblivion tumbling from my own pedestal I considered
my part in her choice had I been kind enough or kind at all could it have ended differently
how had we all missed those storm clouds gathering the cumulative force of gravity
overwhelming a place of eternal entanglement from which not even light could escape
Charlie Kalogeros-Chattan followed her heart from her native New England to Carson Mesa, near Taos, in Northern New Mexico, where she lives off the grid with her husband and dogs, the beetles, coyotes and rattlesnakes. Her work has been published in journals including the Santa Fe Literary Review, Conceptions Southwest, Trickster, and various anthologies; and has been included in the Telepoem Booth Project at the New Mexico Highlands University, in Las Vegas, NM and on the Paseo at Taos. She has an M.A. from the University of Chicago.