• Philip Gross

 

Switching On The Collider

 

And what if the click of that switch
            (Did you notice the date:
            10.09.08… like a countdown?)
had thrown us
                        the universe
      into reverse?


If we were surfing backwards,
            the crest of the wave
            refurling into itself,
would, or rather
                             could we know
      as every cell reverts?


We’d have to say this in Aymaran 
            (the past, they figured
            as before them,
the future
                        a vague whispering
behind). Reeling back


to the moment we met (Yes,
            this is a love song
            that starts with the End)
would we be possessed
                        by an almost
inkling we’d already known


a life together… which,
            come to think of it,
            was precisely what
we did feel
                        falling
into recognition, each of each, ten years ago?

               for Zélie

 

 

 

 

 

Ninth Month

 

No way out of it now, girl, you’ve grown
   Biblical: a city builded on an hill,


you lean back, always meeting our gaze
   across its skyline, with both your hands full


of it, absently stroking. I can almost see
   it rising, pugged clay on the potter’s wheel,


shaping up, and silence rising with it, talk
   exhausted, all attention circling in until


time and the room’s space mould in round
   that gravity, and I think prehistoric: tumuli


on bare downs, a horizon that might blow awry
   but for this grounding us, body and soul.


No small-talk. I think: birth mound/grave mound
   /growing point. The word is gravid, after all.