Barycenter Light Delay
I keep walking into rooms of mirrors
and calling it a crowd.
Every face gives me back my own light
in a color I didn’t choose-
too loud, too red, too much
and I stand there arguing with glass
about what I actually look like.
What I’m supposed to be!
But I have been reading the sky wrong too.
I thought burning out was the failure.
I thought the goal was steady,
a pilot light, a polite little glow
nobody has to comment on.
Nobody names a constellation
after a star that stayed small.
When I go, I want it to be the other way-
all of it at once, the whole ninety-nine years
of my favorite number
held breath thrown outward,
heavier elements than I started with,
iron and calcium and every hard thing
I made inside myself under pressure.
That’s the part they never tell you:
the supernova isn’t the ending.
It’s the only way a star has
of getting its insides into somebody else’s bones.
So let them look. Let them see
what they want to see-
I know what I’m made of.
I was there for the collapse.