Old poems
Dans la vie intérieure, le temps tient lieu d’espace.
(In the inner life, time takes the place of space.)
Simone Weil, La Pesanteur et la Grâce
(Gravity and Grace)
Inside [the black hole’s horizon] … [what used to be a spatial coordinate] is the time … The singularity … is not a place in space; it is a moment in time.
James B. Hartle, Gravity
In my old poems was
The sentimental one
Scenting sighs, seeing scars
Everywhere, twisting them
Into words, squeezing words
So they fit in a grid,
Regular, repeating.
Preoccupied, she wanted the answer
To the only question: What had made her
Like this? An effect that sought the cause and
Nothing else. Her city caught in a verdant
Early summer day; light abounded; she
Felt time had been running out silently.
How much has really changed ever since?
I now have an answer, and more:
She made me; cause, effect. Questions!
How will I be? What will I be?
And what am I?
I’m a tiny bit of what she was not:
The all-embracing space and time beyond
Her self, her fear of being forgotten,
Solitude unwitnessed, and pain futile.
I’m not merely her descendant either.
Holding her precious gift of exposed soul,
I too am exposed to what I am not,
Asking how much has changed, what I’m changing.
in original form c. 2018