Jenny Ward Angyal
Stardust
Where does poetry go when the shimmering web of 86 billion neurons begins to lose its shine? Do words slip down the silver threads of axons into oblivion as 500 trillion connections disconnect? What becomes of poems as yet unwritten when three pounds of matter starts to shrivel? The doctors only shrug.
And how did poems arise from that blubbery blob of jelly in the first place?
Maybe when the jelly melts they return to their origin in the vast net of Indra—that jeweled tapestry whose every juncture bears a multifaceted gem; whose every gem is reflected in every other. A glittering singularity impossible to pick apart or grasp or measure, the warp and weft of all that is.
the tidal pull
of the Milky Way
on comets
and on fireflies . . .
this flickering in my mind
About the Author
Jenny Ward Angyal’s tanka have appeared widely in journals and in her collection, moonlight on water (2016). She is tanka editor of Under the Basho.