You laid the city out for me in constellations

nocturnal (and always on foot)

plotting its key configurations—

Monastiraki, Keramikos, Omonia…

Scorpio had chased Orion

from the sky, its expanses benign

warm pewter to etch on.
Now, as he inches back

for a season of game (a sanctioned

but no less fatal hunt) we chart

new corners, the cold reaches

of Metaxourghio, Neos Kosmos, Sigrou Fix

So my map is indelible with the art

of a mathematician’s hand—

though your body, like your physics

would elude me in it, always slipping

through the blanks in the diagram.
By day, I trace its lines underground

dark, clanging journeys coursing

between elements and compounds.

It is milk, you tell me—gala—a revelation

of white particles, viscose, barely substantial

cohering against the probability of motion.

Elated, you marvel at its sum—an amalgam

of all the preceding, still existing, moments. 
But unscientific, I could not reach back to them

discern the echoes of an expiring cosmos

or lapsed seconds from light-years

since your footfall on Solonos.

Gauging the distance between stars

I hold up an index finger, two digits,

a hand-span, and measure the emptiness in units. 
And when I buy a pomegranate for my sill

(to lure you) I’m given a pair. They sit

axis tilted, in erratic unstable orbit

a two-body problem. Later they will

hear you lay back, still shuddering

and say the universe has changed

but it is always changing, I say

and so it did—shifting and fragmenting too fast

to grasp, before I’d even registered its range.