Homing Beacon

By Sarah Lewis

In French, 

time is a location,

A point on a temporal map.

On ne dit pas quand, mais où.

One does not say when, but where.

A location,

like the park three blocks

from my grandma’s apartment in New York

where I would run,

half-naked, half-wild

across water sprayed asphalt,

launch myself at sprinklers

crawl, soaked, 

through the bellies of enormous plastic hippos,

and feel joy as invincible as the buildings 

which surged towards the sky.

A location, 

made of a precise moment,

preserved like a point on a map.

And I wonder, then, 

if we can return. 

If there is some great, cosmic cartographer

who traced our lives in little lines,

on some crinkly piece of parchment,

sold in an alien gas station

to cranky travelers in transit

who stopped to picnic 

by the side of the road,

tracing in indolent ennui 

the highways of our memories,

with their oddly jointed fingers.

I think,

that when Lem wrote Solaris

he knew that the only reason

people leave Earth

is to come back,

to find that cruel miracle

that will resurrect the past,

transpose our memories into flesh

and bring us back to where we belong,

where we desperately want to return,

where we probably never were in the first place.

Maybe there is a way,

something that’s been there all along

knowledge deep and dark and cold and ancient

like the ocean,

full of life beyond our comprehension,

full of answers we can’t understand.

Chemists and wisemen

witches and priests

fill grimoires with their theories.

Maybe

somewhere between

the corner of my lips

and the edge of the universe

that expands onto nothing

there waits something older,

colder, 

grim and graceful,

something that snuffs out supernovas

and sews up black holes.

Or,

maybe

somewhere between 

hydrothermal vents

and undersea mountain ranges

and creatures that look 

like children's sketches 

of monsters,

there lies the answer 

to why we’re here 

in the first place.

But what else sleeps there in that deep dark?

What knowledge cannot be mapped in sonor and psalms?

Where is the way back to what we once had?

How deep must we go? 

How far from shore

till we reach where the horizon meets the sea

and find ourselves back in that park

dripping with water

crawling through the belly of the beast

smiling up at a sky that we thought would never change.