To His Coy Mz
by Terry Jones
Had we a stable space-time, Mz,
This long postponement were no fuss:
As flat geometry will tell
Our world-lines would run parallel;
Then I’d take with timeless care
The spectra of your every hair
And like the stable stars above
Have no half-life to my love.
Plate tectonics then would be
A journey swift enough for me:
Were you in California
And I in windy Aintree
As continents we’d meet at last
And slowly build an everest.
But the sinking universe
Is running into swift reverse;
Inevitably, by quantum law,
Stars are dying by the score,
And in their ashes we will be
Subject to this entropy.
As waves of energy grow old
And the glowing cosmos cold,
In time’s flash you may turn soon
Chaste and sterile as the moon.
So, let’s observe the inverse square
And gravitate together where
Our ashes may most easily weave
A binary system of our love.
Though cryogenics sounds quite nice
Stone-cold lovers cut no ice.
Now therefore, before our molecules
Are scattered to galactic pools,
And our passion, as it must,
Drifts as interstellar dust,
Let’s fuse our elements into one
And switch on like proto-Sun;
With charm and strangeness, like the quark,
Burn fierce as quasars in the dark
And prove here with our human will
A strong anthropic principle.
Though everything in time will be
A pointless singularity,
And though we cannot halt the loss,
Yet we can build our own cosmos.
Terry Jones’ debut short collection, Furious Resonance, was published by Poetry Salzburg in 2011, the year he was the winner of the Bridport Prize. His poems have appeared in Poetry Review, The New Statesman, Agenda, Ambit, The London Magazine, Magma, Iota, The North, Poem, ShoP, The Dark Horse, Poetry Salzburg, New Welsh Review, The Interpreters House, TheRialto, Orbis, Brittle star (and elsewhere) and online in Mascara, Ink, Sweat and Tears, Angle Journal of Poetry in English, The Literateur , The Bow-Woe shop, Antiphon (and elsewhere). TJones12@mail.com
