She Is Here and Not Here by David Hutto
She weaves her skirts
from beams of light
with stellar looms
on neutron stars.
On her bed across the Milky Way,
dark matter forms the blankets.
Her language is vibrating atoms,
and her eyes change colors like dreams.
Her bracelets hang with red dwarf suns,
round her neck swirls a meteorite.
Her jewelry of seven dimensions
is made of blue midnight.
When she travels the silent dark,
she rides on a gravity wave.
All the energy patiently waiting
through the somber span of space
begins in the notes of her singing.
You never can know
if she passes nearby.
You never will see her
move through,
or know where she is or is not,
or when she appears far away.
Bio
David Hutto’s work has recently appeared in Avalon Literary Review and Broken Spine and appeared in 2024 in Galway Review, Paterson Literary Review, Brussels Review, Mediterranean Poetry, Literally Stories, Mudfish, and Cable Street. His experience includes a writers’ retreat in Mérida, Mexico in 2024 and a residency at the Vermont Studio Center in 2003, with an upcoming writers’ retreat in Dublin, Ireland. He has also won first-place poetry awards from state-wide contests in Alabama and Georgia.
Author's note
I consider everything as being connected, so to me science and religion, for example, are just different ways of looking at the same thing, and I also include art as one of those ways of seeing. In writing the poem “She Is Here and Not Here” I began with an idea of creating a female goddess whose realm would be the entire universe. As I wrote, it felt natural to me to invoke what we currently know about that universe (our scientific ideas), presenting those ideas in a poetic language.
