Ashen Confessions

They taught me space was up,

but “up” is local grammar,

a dialect of gravity developed on the ground— every roof points out

along a different radial answer,

every basement calls the same mass inward by “down.”

Put a person at my antipode: our verticals divide us,

both can point above their heads and point oppositely through space; neither

lies—the word is true inside the field that has defined it,

truth can keep its local function while it fails to keep one

face. So I watch Orion rise,

though nothing there is rising; Earth rolls east and lets the western

dark disclose the frame,

and the sky appears to cross us because motion likes disguises— move

the witness, hold the picture,

blame the picture for the change. (ahhhh)

Even standing is acceleration: soil supplies resistance,

stops my body taking geodesics through the planet toward its core; what

I call my weight is ground refusing my free-falling,

I feel held because the earth won’t let me fall through it

anymore.

That should comfort me.

The back door was left on the latch.

Cold entered without needing to be vast.

Hook

There is no

universal

up. Only out from here.

Only down from here.

The sky surrounds me.

That does not mean it chose me.

If the cosmos were eternal,

static, evenly seeded, then each narrow line of sight should terminate against

a star— farther suns look smaller,

yes, but shells grow squared to meet them,

distance dims the individual,

not the total from afar.

Every patch of night would stack the stellar surfaces behind it,

every black between the lights would be another light delayed; heaven ought

to burn as bright as one continuous photosphere— not some jewellery of

fire on an otherwise unlit plane. (ahhhh)

But it’s dark.

Not empty—dark, a measurable distinction,

not a lack of information but information in the lack: light has

had a finite age to cross a growing field of distance,

wavelengths stretch, stars weren’t always there,

and not all brightness makes it back.

So night is not the universe withholding an admission; night’s the limit

of arrival wearing black across its face,

a negative result that narrows what the physical conditions could have been—absence

producing evidence by taking up its place.

I used to call the darkness nothing.

Nothing wouldn’t tell us this.

A bowl sat upside down beside the steps.

Nobody said what it was covering.

Hook

The dark says no.

The dark says not forever.

Not all at once.

Not everything from everywhere.

It tells me something happened.

It won’t tell me why.