Jared Carter

Fallen Apples

Step onto the front porch
in late August. Scent
of wind-fallen apples,
some of them crushed,

split open by the fall. Bees,
moving among the shadows.
Hovering over the phlox,
a moth the color of the moon.

As you reach to pick up
the newspaper – the touch
of a strand of spider’s web,
a single long filament,

raveling. You look around.
The pale orb of the web
is farther back, floating
above the hydrangea.

It did not exist yesterday,
it is here now, waiting.
There is always this surprise
that something so fragile,

so perfect, could have been
spun in a single night. For
whatever pauses, then,
whatever dreams, or drifts

in search of something
indefinable, quite simply
that is what it signifies –
there is always this surprise.

Watching the Clock

A convicted killer whose execution was botched last year was never in any pain
and appeared to be straining to see a clock, not grimacing as some witnesses
said, the warden told a panel reviewing Florida's lethal injection procedures.
But the condemned man's lawyer said his client was clearly suffering, and he
mocked the notion that the inmate was looking at a clock.
-- Associated Press, January 30, 2007

At the center of each galaxy waits
that mysterious, unfathomable abyss –
black hole of unimaginable proportions
from which no illumination can escape,
into which ultimately everything falls
and yet there is no way of entering,
only a threshold to be crossed –
the event horizon, against which
each image, each body remains fixed
forever. The hands of the clock,
as they approach that boundary, freeze
immutably, and the prisoner, strapped
to the board with his arms spread out,
is transfigured for eternity, along with
the warden and his phone, the attorney,
the reporters, the witnesses – all shown
together, as it is written in Revelation,
along with “heaven, the earth, and . . .
the sea, and the things which are therein,
that there should be time no longer.”