Life was not just an oxygen experiment.
It was musical in a familiar way.
I lay under the Christmas tree imagining
the radio of eleven light galaxies.

Everyone seemed to have headaches in those times,
as if life itself were one long snow day, vinyl
spinning, sad notes flying about the hard city,
trees on fire, depressed freeways not quite listening.

I did not want to be the inexorable child,
shoplifting my past, did not want to become a
robot, sipping godliness in some honky-tonk,
or nanny to the world, dusting curtains all day.

I would have to make a career, stomping around
like a mastodon to find a portal, some rough crack
in the old world for us to spark through. I would have
to head for an impossible destination,

some place no one had recognized, eleven light
galaxies. Simon and Garfunkel a portal
on this hard December afternoon, snow spinning,
this godless child listening for life to spark through.

Terry Wolverton is the author of eleven books of poetry, fiction and creative non-fiction, most recently, RUIN PORN. She is the founder of Writers At work, a creative writing studio in Los Angeles, and Affiliate Faculty in the MFA Writing Program at Antioch University Los Angeles. http://terrywolverton.com.