Meetings at Light Speed

Oisín Breen

We hurtled, a mile-a-minute,
Skinny-dipping in the wet streams,
Climbing trees, then scaffolding desire,
Only to rumble – it – to pull it –
To tear – it – from sundry at once,
Until gasping at its new-found shapelessness,
It, a mirror of our breath, as we sighed
In the sluice-broke pluckings of laughter fulfilled,
It turned us to engorged ticks, fattened, on one another’s blood,
Until finally, we breathlessly paused,

Until once again
We were ready to drink deep,
And we drank deep,

And then, again we hurled ourselves on,
Some 299 million 792 thousand 458 miles a second
Unto the neo-Mohist space, where the reaching never reaches,
And Zeno, having mock-turtle for his supper, shares platitudes
And beatitudes with our hitting that zenith before slumber,
Fitful, sojourning, worn-out, state-of-love selves,

And then we enjoyed that crushing thrill of being in the moment,
Yet momentarily also being of it: 

            Of the fierce embodiment of entropy,
            Of gas-lit Victorian streets held in memory,
            Of walking arm in arm to snatch at the brittle leaves,
            Eager to –

And the leaves were beautiful
Like you, now, as I reach out to kiss you:
A moment of slowness in a life built for pace.

The Science

The poem is inspired by a mixture of my own history, the history of others, life, the relationship between decay, order, and the social functioning of society, and from a scientific angle it is inspired by the concept of entropy, and my own research into complexity theory as it applies to narratology, which includes everyone from Prigogine to Wiener, and far beyond that.

The Poet

A poet, part-time academic in narratological complexity, and financial journalist, Dublin-born Oisín Breen’s widely reviewed debut collection, Flowers, all sorts in blossom, figs, berries, and fruits, forgotten was released in March 2020. Breen has been published widely in journals, including About Place, Door is a Jar, Northern Gravy, the Blue Nib, Books Ireland, the Seattle Star, Zvona i Nari, La Piccioletta Barca, the Bosphorus Review of Books, Reservoir Road, In Parentheses, the madrigal, and Dreich magazine.

Next poem: Planet Earth in a Volatile State by Bibhuti Narayan Biswal