simon dedeo

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The collection is on the far point of Manhattan.
The desks are unmanned, the guards are
stationary and sweltering in the heat that comes
from the water and reflects off the sky.

*

She remembers looking through the atlas of
galaxies taken by the telescope on Mount Wilson.
Next to each photograph was listed the time of
exposure: thirty minutes, eighty minutes, fifty
minutes.

She remembers the telephone numbers: M51,
M101, M81. And the New General Catalog
numbers, the digits filing past the exposures
towards the images, each galaxy in isolate.

*

To the woman, it feels as if the gardens were a
lens, compressing them in the light together. She
feels cool to the touch, she seems herself with him
and both are transparent to the heat, like some
perfected alloy.

*

He thinks with the mind of a child, of something
being the case as actually in a case, a wooden one,
like the museums he went to when he was a child,
long rows in high cool halls, carefully spaced
under thick glass: dim purple brooches, brass
balancing balls, letters (face up), boxes of all
kinds, tools to measure and weigh, fractional
amounts of pure substance.

And elsewhere insects, petrified, fossilized or in
amber; bones and rags frozen in decay; primitives
of all kinds: primitive horns and bells, primitive
designs, primitive knives and hammers and guns.

Simon DeDeo is a scientist and poet in Chicago, where he edits
_rhubarb is susan_ and co-edits _absent magazine_.