The truth was disappointing.

 

I was hopeful he’d give us a chance to merge topographies.

 

Honolulu’s on an island, though. And Colorado is a land-locked state.

 

New York. A decade ago. We could but never connected. Then a heat wave followed the Fourth of July last summer, colliding us between Park Slope and Tribeca before returning to Honolulu. Colorado.

 

Behind us now is softening to hundreds of thousands of dots of disappearing possibility.

 

This is the spectrum of the star. It shows the presence of fine dark lines.

 

Honolulu. A word as mellifluous as cellar door.

 

Honolulu. After Queen Liliuokalani’s reign The Sun burns through its helium.

 

Honolulu. Let me go please. And maybe things will come back around.

 

“Her metaphors can be tricky,” he acknowledged when I asked where Kathy Acker was going with the whole U.N. embezzlement ring in Rip-off Red. “Like the jewels could be the “family” jewels or someone’s soul or both.”

 

Then he left to go be sugar at the end of a rough week.

 

I persisted. Here’s clouds from earlier, I said, oblivious to his radio silence. And here’s the book passage I decided to pair them with, ‘she learned to love sky blue. / End of the dream.’

 

I wanted to go on dreaming we were sisters of the sun with tens of millions of years to go wandering beneath the skies of Honolulu.

 

The fallen wooden frames of Colorado’s ghost towns and bison waiting for the rain. Miners panning for unused frequent flier points by the banks of the River Lethe.

 

I cranked open the dome of Colorado’s Community College of Aurora observatory and peered through the telescope. I saw Jupiter, its Galilean moons. And I saw Mars, too. Mars was red, like the giant that will one day envelop and devour Mercury and Venus before it moves onto Earth.

 

I didn’t tell him about the dream I had.

 

I was playing Schubert on a Steinway as the Honolulu sunset blushed. After the folded edge of the Pacific went dark we could hear the distant chants of ancient invocations to Lono and Pele.

“Listen” he wrote later, “I think you’re SUPER sexy and WAY WAY smart. I like how fast your mind moves. But you are going to have to chill on this one. Once I touch down in Honolulu I will have ZERO time to answer emails, make calls. I get laundry and grocery shopping done on the weekend its a fucking miracle.”

 

Colorado. Where a bilge pump in the basement bails a flooding home and marijuana funds fuel a state symphony.

 

“Hi… you know I love your writing. It’s amazing. But nothing has changed… I have a little time right now but the amount of looming stuff to do in the next month is massive. What I am saying is that I don’t mind you writing me and will read what you have to say but please don’t expect a response. This is why I feel you should focus your affections elsewhere right now. It can’t be reciprocal. Yes, you are sexy as hell but that is just idle fantasy for me and is not going to help me be present and attentive to the moment at hand.”

 

A white dwarf. The kernel light at the center will endure. Like the diamonds of a bankrupt monarchy.

 

“I love your mind but please don’t write me so much. Please. Please. Move on for now and we will catch up sometime down the road.”

 

Colorado. Where abandoned mine shafts are sealed with caution signs. And it snows through mid-May.  And the air is dry.

 

“You, my dear, have to leave me alone methinks. I just don’t have the time or the energy to keep up with you. We are not headed towards reciprocity.”

 

If there’d been more reciprocity in our digital dialog, I said, you’d have had the chance to find out for yourself what mistakes I’ve made and what I’ve learned as a result. And I could have learned more about you.

 

“Okay… none of the things you’re saying are untrue. It is really just timing and what is possible for me right now. Really. Nothing more.”

 

He signed off, “You take care.”

 

Honolulu. A ridgeline of volcanic cones and vents. Like Earth when it was young.

 

“Let me go. Please. And maybe things will come back around,” he said.

 

The stars in the Pleiades are bound by gravity but eventually they’ll drift apart.

 

“My interest in you (and perhaps yours in me) is not altogether healthy,” he continued. “You’re violent in the sack. I’ve been with some wildcats in my time but none that scratched me as deep as you did on my neck. So for me to now “moo” you on any kind of regular basis would be accepting the invitation to danger.”

 

“I don’t know what your criteria is for concluding that.” I responded. “You talk about feminism in theater yet you’re imposing these arch stereotypes that I don’t identify with.”

 

“Let me go. Please. And maybe things will come back around,” he said.

 

Nebula. Neutron star. Supernova. Hypernova.

 

“Please let me go,” he repeated. “I’m really not equipped for anymore.”

 

Honolulu. From Hawaiian hono “port” and lulu “calm. Colorado. Where The Great Divide marks the high peak hydrological division between the Bering Strait and the Strait of Magellan.  And anti-fracking activists are called fractivists. And prairie grass blows.

 

I beam magnified starlight in his direction.

 

Over mountains, through canyons, across Mojave where sand and gravel basins drain. Spanning half the Pacific until it stops in Honolulu.

 

“Thank you,” he acknowledged. And asked, “When were you thinking of coming down?”  Then radio silence.

 

Background Imaging of Cosmic Extragalactic Polarization at the bottom of the world detects primordial gravitational waves. Pinwheel swirls.Traces.

 

Photo By: Kevin Dooley