Seth Peterson

Living in a World of Worlds

I’ll never get to see them all. I’ll have to imagine

river otters lounging at the crest of angel falls,

& just believe in the narwhal’s existence

behind a brilliant veil of sea ice, the two-thousand-

acre-long honey fungus. It won’t be easy.

I’ll never know for sure what happens after all

that bustle on the honeysuckle. & I suppose

I’ll have to have faith that ants can feel something

other than urgency, or that violet nightshade

in the asphalt knows that it’s beautiful.

In my life, I’ll have to settle for revealing worlds

one by one, like the layers of a nesting doll.

I’d like to see an elderly fisherman

with notched brown eyes & a caved-in face,

the shocked appearance of his just-beheaded fish,

air rich with scale shimmer, cleaver song.

Maybe I can dream him. Or the vivid red eyes

of a metalworker entrusting his daydreams

to flame. I hate to think I’ll never know

how it feels to make music. & if I ever do

come face-to-face with a cellist, I would ask

how to communicate passion with a string.

But suppose they’d only tell me in exchange

for a testimony of my own. My longings,

blessings, regrets. I gaze upon my boys

like two sleeping planets, their skin

a dazzle of molecules that have existed

since the world was a whisper of dust.

Two sacks of seven billion billion billion

atoms, & moons named electron,

& me—trying to memorize their breath.