An eye where a button should be.
A loss. Find the jar filled with everything
that is smaller than you
and locate a stray button to close the eye.
Squint your eye around a microscope,

telescope, horoscope. Find a new
way to see. Locate a star
where a pond should be. You can
see better with a microscope.
Find how tiny things can still beat you.

Condensation beads on the lip
of the jar and then you lift
the jar: inverted Petri dish. The pond:
inverted sky. Jump into the pond
and hope not to land in a Petri dish

for whatever is bigger than you.
Find a sky map and chart your course
through the pond. Use a telescope
to find a star that is dying for you.
You are this same speck in the sky
of something smaller and smaller
and smaller.

__

I guess this poem germinated out of a fascination with perspective, relativity. I like the idea of the specific becoming nebulous. How something like size or weight seems so fixed, so concrete; but really, the significance of those things is completely dependent upon the lens through which they’re viewed (and there are infinite lenses). A falling away of specificity via ever-shifting points of view, of comparison. It’s a weightless feeling (from my perspective, of course); and one in which I like to imagine myself standing still while the whole universe spins around me.