The Dark That Sleeves the Sun's Long Arms or (Love)

If the second chapter of My Father’s Hand Is a Mountain Range is about solitude, then the third chapter is about what happens when two solitudes collide: Love.

More specifically, it’s about love and science — the immeasurable and us, instruments of measure.

With our pulses and our seasons, our cycles and our cell-rate deteriorations — we are clocks floating through eternity.  Our tick-tick-ticking echoes out into the expanse, a symphony of metronomes, a Cartesian countdown to detonation. 

It could be lonely, except we are not alone. 

Thank the damned there is a saboteur in the spur wheels, a meddler in the ancient mechanism, a blood-hungry demon beating its own measure in the middle of each of us. 

Love, the great disrupter, disturbs the chronicler and gives purpose to the pendulum.  It bends time, allowing an eyelash flutter to last a lifespan; and distorts space, so that even touching feels far away. 

The closest analogy I can find for this type of power lies in the very heart of the cosmos: a black hole. 

© okalinichenko

To risk not giving the exact science its fair due, what I gather about black holes is this:  The center becomes too heavy and the fabric of the universe is overwhelmed.  Which, to me, is (even if romanticized) an accurate description of love.

© Christian

The poems in chapter three are the findings from one instrument's journey into the dark.

In one poem, the pen becomes a telescope reaching into the expanding void in search of another. 

In a later poem, a lover’s hand becomes the sun’s long arms reaching into a winter-hardened valley. 

One poem is about the kind of talk that takes place between our animal sounds.  Another explores a breakup through the possibility of a parallel universe where every decision is remade differently. 

The final poem in this chapter depicts the delicate nature of a relationship's ending. 

These poems also carry with them the weight from chapter two, the baggage of someone whose self-sentence of solitary “definement”  has left them not knowing how to love or (equally important) how to be loved.