Today's poem is by Albert Goldbarth

The Demarcations Song
        The year 1910 bore little resemblance to 1914.
        The year 1945 was altogether different from 1946.
                                —Richard Erdoes, in AD 1000

The minute before she bites down on the engagement ring
he'd secreted in the cream cheese muffin
isn't the minute of squealing joy (and Heimlich maneuver)
that follows it. The day before
the assassin centers that famous presidential head
in the crosshairs. The minute—the second,
even. It always comes down to a single causative
pico-inch or gap or darkening freckle.
The length of the birth canal: is Hannibal's,
is Marco Polo's, is Lewis and Clark's
odometer more determinative than that
on muscle, intimate and pulsing?
The minute before the first amazing, colonial
footstep onto the lunar surface. The minute after
the separating of light from dark, then:
second day of Creation, here we come!
Proximity, distance: there must be as many metrics
for understanding these as there are times in a clock.
The width of a ribbon of DNA.
The minutes the Wright brothers stayed in the air.
In 1843, awaiting the arrival of the angle
of the Second Coming, the Millerite Adventists
'stood in nightshirts on their rooftops,'
thinking those few feet climbed up closer to Heaven
would make a difference. My nonbeliever friends carry
a version of that hope and wonder
inside themselves—congruent with themselves.
There is no distance involved. It's all one thing.
The neurons and their thought.
The nerve and its data.

Copyright © 2024 Albert Goldbarth All rights reserved
from Conduit
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission