carroll

a man took his dead wife to the moon six weeks ago.

--

pumped full of adrenaline, hands shaking and lightheaded.

tachycardic and short of breath,

full of reverence.

--

a religion of discovery,

of knowledge and the cosmos,

and of her.

--

and while he should be worshiping the science of unfathomable coincidences

required for this singular moment to exist,

for anything and everything to exist,

chanting prayers for the hot gasses and spinning rocks that

create, created, will create

spectacular displays across his field of vision,

--

he’s stuck

kneeling at her altar.

--

he sees her absence

in the long spaces in between,

the dark, the cold, the inhospitable,

the fear.

--

more than that, so much more,

he sees her life

in that bright spot on the moon,

that unnamed beacon

dotting its rocky, gradient surface.

--

and he has galaxies at his fingertips,

cradles the moon in his palms,

but it is her, always her,

that he holds first.

--

and in the face of all the vastness of space,

he knows that he’s already mapped his universe.

he knows its center

and every single corner,

--

or he knew it once,

--

before.

--

but love is carrying that old universe with him

while he rockets and spins and tumbles into a new one.

--

love is overlaying that old handwritten map across this new world

and finding the same points in this great unknown

that had existed once,

before.

--

and there it is.

it’s a bright spot on the moon,

and we would like to call it carroll.