How Small Are You?

How much of the sky can you swallow
In your tiny, incandescent shell?
What can you gather at 2am,

Waking to quiet and then the sound
Of a woman drunkenly laughing
And singing someone Happy Birthday

Under the winter stars in the dark
Several blocks away, while a truck
Grunts through the otherwise empty street,

And a freakishly slow meteor,
From the February Geminids,
Makes a long, noiseless streak and is gone—

How small are you, taking all this in?
Your own breath and pulse and creaky limbs
Might as well be part of the night sky,

The empty courtyard, the far-off song,
The truck, the meteor. The cold air
Itself is your body’s sensation.

Do you hold it or does it hold you?
You are a little loop of words, thoughts,
Planetary system of mirror

Shards reflecting pinging wavelengths back
And forth among each other. You are
None of these things. These things are long gone.

You are a reader in the desert,
Having hiked on a hot day through stones
To come to the headstone of this poem.