Sometimes you sit in a chair which someone else has just left, and feel the warmth they left behind. You pick up a sweater from the bed and find it warm; the dog has been sleeping there.

This afternoon, lying on the sofa, I closed a book and left it on my chest a while. I pondered the chapter I’d just read, looked at the Christmas tree, and checked the insides of my eyelids for light leaks. When I picked up the book again, I was surprised to find that it was warm. It was warm from the warmth of me. Imagine that.

I suppose this phenomenon has always part been of my life; maybe others have felt the heat that I’ve left behind in a chair. I’ve never given it much thought. I mean I don’t consider myself warm like other people. It’s bizarre to think that someone would take comfort in a chair I left behind, unless I did so anonymously.

I think of myself as neither hot nor cold, but as a moon in the neutral ambient radiation of spacetime. I am not measured in decrees Fahrenheit, in sound or silence, words or innocence of paper, not in mass or texture or even in weight, but in energy – 100 ergs per gram of irradiated whatever. I put this here and that there and sit back, as the equator pitches more or less to the arc of the bland, indifferent sun. So I’m IO or Ariel. A placekeeper, an orb to keep the pretty cosmic mobile, hung for an infant’s bassinet, just for a moment spinning true.

Keeping Things Whole

In a field

I am the absence

of field.

This is

always the case.

Wherever I am

I am what is missing.

When I walk

I part the air

and always

the air moves in

to fill the spaces

where my body’s been.

We all have reasons

for moving.

I move

to keep things whole.

— Mark Strand