New Episode, New Exoplanets to Discover

My friend and former colleague Claudine (seventhsister) wrote this and I had to share, because I know you will love it.


New Episode, New Exoplanets to Discover

I am examining life's data tables
mulling over the numbers, the bar graphs,
the pie charts, the histograms, the scatter plots...
I find myself in a Victorian graveyard
standing above Faraday's grave, my physicist,
my rock star, and I wonder how fascinating
magnetism must have been when its properties
were first discovered. How through the air
power could transform itself, like the way
love moves from host to host like a virus,
and my heart succumbs since I've no antibodies
to combat the wounds she slices through me.

Life's data is sporadic, chaotic
I cannot predict the retrograde motion
of two celestial bodies combining
moving westward, moving eastward.
I bite my fingernails worrying about being loved
being loved for real, I used to say.

but what is it worth? a gravestone in Highgate?
a fancy urn with black emptiness welling up inside?
A mausoleum under the Lebanese Cedar?
A simple subtraction of numbers, maybe I'll get to 70,
but who will love me beyond then?

A man's funeral procession racked up half of London,
but no a flower, not a petal to be seen.

And Siddel! may I be a raven-haired muse
like you, with my bare breasts at the Tate,
or my social security number tattooed to a tree somewhere,
bury me with your physics equations, bury me with your poetry
put the planets names to be discovered in my wretched hands
upon dying.

And exhume me in your dreams, collect
the poems, word by word, stanza by stanza
variable by variable, and assemble a mission
to the darkest craters of the moon.