Late Vision
This floater, semi-solid nomad through
the region where vision goes liquid,
could be the unraveling and collapse
of the universe, bits of matter spun into
the orbit of rheuming eyes, planets going dim
so slowly the shadows seem like friends.
It’s easy at the first sighting to believe
your brain, all the nerves and veins
that make you might implode,
that you have caught the signal predicting
the storm to come. All this as retirement looms
for the Hubble Telescope, suddenly replaced
for a newly-configured instrument said to provide
vision enough to find the near birth of
the universe. Soon enough we might be looking at
baby pictures of outer space, the cosmos toddling
into view, but a shadow will always live, too thin
for a telescope to see, between vision and truth.
The new scope will not deliver the Hubble’s beautiful
distortions of space and time. But we have always loved
the inaccuracies distance bestows. We stare at that
beauty we did nothing to create and wish that distance
between ourselves and a present busy breaking against
the past, the future already on fire and ignoring us.
© Al Maginnes
Al Maginnes has published ten full-length collections and four chapbooks of poetry, most recently Fellow Survivors: New and Selected Poems (Redhawk Publications, 2023). New poems and reviews appear in Off Course, Cimmaron Review, Arkansas Review and many others. He retired from teaching and lives with his family in Raleigh NC.
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