The Planets
For my Brothers
Joshua Jennings Wood
We cannot be closer.
Our gravities
Keep us balanced in familiar orbits.
The miraculous catastrophe, wave
We rode hurtling us to our places
While we were undifferentiated
Has broke.
Now we spin comfortably if
Coldly, circling in our celestial
Corners.
What collisions we incur come
As echoes of an older explosion.
But we turn in the dark, thick partners with
Dizziness.
Dead legends puncture the sky.
Memory is the vacuum we move in.
The smaller bodies have yet to settle
In their strict patterns of evasion.
~~~~~
Joshua Jennings Wood's work appears in DIAGRAM, Nimrod, The North American Review, Permafrost, VOLT and elsewhere. He has been a finalist for the James Hurst Prize, Pablo Neruda Prize and recipient of a John Fowles Writing Center Award and is also the poetry editor of dirtcakes, a journal exploring themes suggested by the UN Millennium Development Goals to end extreme poverty by 2015. He teaches at the Orange County High School of the Arts, as well as several area colleges, and lives with his wife and two sons whose combined age is less than five.