One astronaut rises in the wake of a foamy
spacecraft fuselage,
and her twin is a deep underwater fish, ancient,
translucent, disappearing into the deepest water,
evolving through
different geologic orders—gills mutating slowly
into lungs, flippers assuming scales then brittle
proto-skin, dry cackles echoing against weathered
mountain walls; in time, tails
sprout with mammal hair and the long, lumbering tromp
toward sublimated orgasms commuter traffic
a cancerous lump along the curve of the new body.
When the first twin’s spacecraft returns from its
millennia-splitting trip at the speed of light, when
his time slows down to nothing but the endless
perpetual nanosecond counted off on the tick of an
eighteenth-century metronome,
when the old earth-bound fish swims up in a swirl
of bubbles through deep magnetic ether to greet
her sister star,
the space sibling eschews the swollen telepathic
brain and pale yellow skin to become the vestigial
past unraveling like a sweater caught on the tail of
comet:
a gleaming strand of unicellular jelly, a steaming mash of pure
DNA lashing against lighting bolts
in a pool of primitive floating chemicals. The space
twin emerges younger through the genetic mush,
that’s right, devolving into the simple constituent elements,
into so much melting glue.