And things we don't know
And there are also
The world is held together but what holds it apart
Forces
Maybe then the hyphen is a force too
Thermal Dynamics
GravityhThe weak and strong force
and, the hyphen!
The hyphen between story and life
The hyphen that holds the theory of relativity apart from quantum mechanics
Stars die all kinds of deaths, and everything in physics has a counterpart metaphor
The mystics have always known the threshold that physicists have only recently come up against but there is certianly no equation that shows what an equation looks like when it's gone.
Still, as the hyphen is the center of dichotomy, hope is at the center of doubt, and poetry, like physis, when applied correctly, explains the mathematics of why life looks and feels the way it does.
I think that the ring the dwarf star casts off (poof) in its final speed of revolution in death is comprised of noble gases; these gases were integral to the life of the star until its balance tipped in a loss of energy and the hyphen of thermal dynamics versus gravity went sliding out of the equation. The magnificient cloudy halo of hues holds at a distance for some time around the corpse, the rock, the bones; a congregation at the death of a star. And then the elements vanish and the corpse floats thru the appaling void like an abandoned ship in a jet black sea of night; one would never guess that this dog tag of a stranger is the relic of fusion.
When I am walking in the fall the awesome color of the leaves in the trees are like that nebula; the loss of chloroform is the dwindling of energy, the loss of life, the unmistakable pageant of death; a celebration of the final collapse of the hyphen that held those leaves together but, as it turns out, simultaneously held them apart; held the carbon from the earth and the oxygen from the sky.
Liberation.
Turning leaves deck the trees that surround us. A burst of flaming colors that circumscribe us from a short distance before fragmenting and disintegrating out of trace. We are stars at the center shining and dying all the while. You can't find us in the bones. You can't find us in the dissipating elements they cast off. Chalk dust and chalk. Numbers knocked from the blackboard equations. These are merely the coverjacket of a story-life about what happens when zero gets divided. It's a story that never was.
I watch the year set and when night falls and winter comes the moon will come into greater focus but only as it seems more distant than ever; it will be the realization of how far away those other stars are that seemed so close when life was burning bright. Before the appaling darkness of winter sentences us to a subzero universe of loneliness we must conjure a cloud of language that first obscures us but finally ushers us out of the consequences of that equation.
Stars die all kinds of deaths. some of them violently explode, exceeding the magnitude of their own galaxies. Some suddenly grow larger than a billion suns combined. But some slowly turn down the power, dim down the lights, cast of an iridescent ring of light and watch their own self set like a sun.
So this is October, and this is October's ring.
