by Julie Allyn Johnson

my husband tries to explain atmospherics, the dark & the light & other lunar-related ephemera, after I wonder aloud why does the sky appear black and void in photographs of planet earth taken from the moon? math I can grasp but science wrecks my brain and then, I think: girl, you’re not really trying. he’s patient with me, references the reddish-orange sunsets during autumn harvests, how we were taught in photography class about the way the dwindling light of dusk bounces off tractor-churned Iowa topsoil, dispersed in the air, those ground-up, dried-up corn stalks and field remnants, vehicles for reflecting a range of the sun’s white light spectrum. he tells me how the exosphere of the moon differs from what we experience here on earth. I think I understand but then I try to regurgitate what he’s told me and the words won’t come, there’s only a vague concept lodged in my head, fading fast, that I’m just not able to articulate. I can thrill to the awe and majesty of our world, the immensity of the unknown, the unreachable vastness of what we are unable to observe without the need to elucidate its mysteries. I content myself with that, just that. my failure to fully understand never diminishes its marvels nor dampens my desire to absorb ever more even though sometimes it only goes in one ear and out the other.

our inscrutable universe
slivers of comprehension
the limits of my understanding

Editors’ note: This is a haibun poem; the form is a prose poem followed by a haiku. 

Image by Neil Morrell from Pixabay