the legacy of whispers.

compared to light, sound crawls slowly, deliberatively,
just over a thousand feet per second. when my lips are an inch from your ear
and i whisper how i love the feel of your back under my fingertips,
my breath massages the air, makes it wash in lazy waves into
your ear canal, and a hundred thousandth of a second later, you hear,
you smile.

and if the earth was not so greedy with its sounds,
with its canyons and trees and atmosphere keeping
even our loudest loudnesses a secret from the rest of the universe,

then right now,

the moon would be hearing us as we were 13 days ago,
but seeing us as we are today: a film perpetually out of sync.

and the sun would hear ella fitzgerald breathe her last notes.
and halfway through its current orbit, Mars would hear my birth.

and at its closest point this cycle, pluto would hear the jamestown massacre
and at its furthest, it would hear a collective sigh as a great famine ends.
how the expanding and contracting rhythm of us must dazzle our
once-planetary comrade, and confuse it.

proxima centauri would hear the first cries of australopithecus

And wolf 359 would hear the crack as orrorin tugenensis split into
two lineages, and in the future, after 6 million of our years had spun away,
it would hear the typing of one of those lineages’ descendents
clumsily exploring our aural legacy
among the stars.