Temporize

A wonderful contemporary, contemplated and airy, aerie past time is finding my favorite place in the sky. All that I have to do is enter the name of the nearest star or galaxy into the search box on Google Sky. Or I can enter into the search box the co-ordinates: right ascension and declination.

Solid boned humans are more familiar with terra firma, with the finding of land locations by latitude — north and south — and by longitude — east and west. These markers remain fixed through quake and tsunami and global warming. And there is plodding over it all, under foot. And plotting for securing resources perceived as fixed and dwindling. Heavy handed it be, and hard hearted, solid sans internal body cavity.

But the celestial latitudes that are declination and the celestial longitudes that are right ascension must be updated, reviewed every 50 years. This is not due, as one might be inclined to suppose, to the fickleness of the sky. Rather it is necessary to update celestial co-ordinates due to the wobble of the Earth. It is the misnamed terra firma that wobbles and waffles under the sway of the gravitational pull of moon and sun.

But I do go on.

And you are right to assume that beneath the invisibility cloak of my pirate ways I am merely buying time. Or wasting time, profligate wastrel.

But pirates do not waste time. They extravagantly pour time out as libation to love. It is a hard rain, coming continuously, supplied copiously, fully expressed corporality. It is act of creation, indecent in its insistence. It is time as poetic scansion, bursting like fragile bubble out of the impossibility of non-existence.

Like Browning’s “lyric love, half angel and half bird, all of a wonder and a wild desire,” there is timely take off. Up beyond the wobble, flying high and flying blind, flying in the face of and flying in the teeth of, there is merely flying. No solid bones, no bones about it.

A waif is all, like a piece of property washed up by the sea, unclaimed, stolen goods thrown away by thieves in the night. There is merely flapping, random movement wafting in a viscous buoyant sky for the stray and homeless, unowned and found merely by chance.

And then soarer sweet comes suspended, space between thoughts, luminescence that has remembered the big bang in body, tonality that sings music of the spheres.

You were seen in the sky by the ancients, and named into existence through myriad narratives though you are nothing but star dust spiraling out of control. The comet trails of your hair weave webs beyond belief. Who can count your ways or name your loves?

You are merely flight, fancy, figment. And you are all in all.

Sky bury me in your uncharted blue. Keep my wings ragged and unclipped. Blow me into being and not. Hide me in the shadow of your wings. 

— Rx is the FloridaW eekly muse who hopes to inspire profound mutiny in all those who care to read. Our Rx ma y be wearing a pir ate cloak of in visibility, but emanating fr om within this shado w is hope that readers will feel free to respond. Who kno ws: You may e ven inspir e the muse. Make contact if you dare.