Birth Mirror

    When he looked at her, he saw the whole universe.  He saw how the atoms in her body came from the salt of the Earth and the nutrients of its growth.  Every organ had once been part of a blade of grass, a piece of dirt in the soil, or the muscle of an animal.  Before that they'd come from the sun, which had given birth to all the complex elements interacting inside her, like sodium, potassium, and iron.  These in turn were born from the splitting of the fundamental two, hydrogen and helium, that burned so brightly in its core.  Both these elements had come into being prior to a supernova that had created the sun about five billion years ago.  Even before this they'd been part of a vast cloud that had condensed into the galaxy we now call the Milky Way.  They'd done this across the whole universe, back when it had nothing but gas everywhere.  The gas had expanded and cooled after the explosion of the Big Bang, proliferating itself to all corners of the obsidian frontier.  As he looked into the woman's black eyes, he saw the constituents of the first atoms forming in deep space, after they'd been taken apart from the whole during the birth of the universe.  You could say that when he looked at her, he looked at everything else that made up the cosmos, for everything was made of the same material when the universe was born.  She was a birth mirror, a being who contained the same mysterious elements that created life before reproduction existed. 

Bavarian Magic

Magic, that marvel of metamorphosis,
Drifts down the slopes of the Bavarian Alps,
Bringing wonder to the snow-laden forests of pine,
Enriching the village nestled in its valley
With gifts of mystery and mirth.
Children skate atop horizontal mirrors
That reflect an ocean of icebergs
Waltzing westward across the sky.
Their parents watch them with faces
Animated by the frostbitten gifts,
Which had blown between the houses
As they ate strudel, drank steins and danced
In the craze of beer gardens.
Barmaids and lumberjacks jiggle to klezmer,
Serenading the winter solstice
With tambourines that cling, kazoos that ring,
Bagpipes that blare all through the air,
All below trees decorated with ornaments
That glitter like the icicles that would have hung
From them had they not been replaced.
Castles crystalized by the coldness of crags
Shine in silence as the early evening
Welcomes the stars above to the crisp countryside.
The smell of grandma’s homemade cookies
Make the children rush inside their homes,
Where the warmth of a fire wraps them in comfort
Before the evening closes its chilly curtain.
The sun is down, Christmas is coming;
Lights are buried in the mountains,
Where whirlwinds of magic
Illuminate dreams in the darkness.

The Virus

    In times before the billions had perished, exponential functions filled a graph that all rose simultaneously: surface temperature, motor vehicles, CO2 concentration, deforestation, extinctions, ozone depletion, GDP, water use, foreign investments; all growing rapidly beyond our control.  Little did we know that an unknown variable resulted from the benevolence of technology, curing us of disease and lessening our ailments, helping us live longer and making our ability to spread stronger.  However much we denied it, four billion was the critical mass, and once we stepped beyond there was no looking back.  Now, standing in boxcars that take us to the sea, we see piles of bodies rotting in the haze of a junkyard that extends for a thousand miles across the plains.  At first, we thought they were mountains of garbage; just plastic shrapnel from all the gyres that spun out in oceanic currents the size of Texas that had been gathered up by pincers for the postindustrial economy.  Most of the functions that destroyed us flattened out after the purge, returning them to rates more familiar to the authority of nature.  Like a plague we consumed the hosts of every territory we occupied and moved to another place after we’d finished, to do the same thing all over again.  It was no surprise then, that the only way for the Earth to stop us was to give us a taste of our own medicine; to unleash a virus that modified the imbalance created by our vanity to control it.