Love, and the Vacuum

1.  
More enigmatic 
Than the tree falling alone
Is the tree heard only by me.

If I hike alone to the summit
At the end of a gritty afternoon
And if, when I stretch my gaze to the pink inner lip of the valley across,
She shimmers, undulates, and gives up for me
Her private aurora,
A palette never to be seen again --
Then, when the act is over,
I have to wonder,
Did any of this happen,
Does anything ever happen,
When you are not with me?

2.
Betty awoke one day
To a world she had not reckoned on.
"Waah," she cried. 
"I have lived my life through you and now you are gone."
When they put her brain back together,
She lifted her voice with the choir and sang,
"Never again will I lose my thread in the weave of another."

But many in the choir, it turns out, were not lost.
They were merely children,
Children who grew up the long way.

I am descended from Betty
But I am a splinter who has left the faith.
I am the architect of a plan so clever
It will carry me
To the land of my choosing,
Regardless of the failings of those around me.

And if the paradoxical last step of this plan
Is surrender?
If I place a pile of my winnings at your feet
To do with what you will
Because I am no longer sure of anything outside of you,
What sings the choir then?

3.
In the box
Schroedinger's cat
Waits
For the axe
To fall.
If you close the lid,
Then immediately 
She is neither
Alive nor dead.

I am that cat
The one who heard the tree.

4.
Breathlessly I stumble down the mountain.
Below the rosy crown there is no color
And my weak eyes cannot protect
Against brambles and gullies.

Still I panic forward,
Aware of what is at stake:
That I have spent far too long roaming 
And if I do not breathe your mortal soil
Before the shadow is complete,
I will be caught in the unbearable vacuum
Of never having happened at all.