After “Perhaps the World Ends Here” by Angie Mason

The world begins
under a street lamp

with the moon waxing crescent
and four days old.

I didn’t know in the beginning
that the universe was kind

and would give warning.
That the night he crashed

his car after our first date
was a gift I should have taken as a sign.

What’s more clear than broken glass
scattered in the moonlight?

Yet at nineteen everything
was a beginning, there was no end.

How could I have been versed
in the language of the universe

when I knew so little of myself?
Perhaps the world he and I created

was supposed to end that night
in Iowa City. Perhaps moving to Mankato

and into our house on Fourth
could have been seen in some fragment

of broken glass on the corner
of Summit and Burlington.

It wasn’t until I was twenty-nine
and the moon was waning gibbous

and nineteen days old did I finally
let the universe lead me to her.

Sitting in her green Subaru,
illuminated under a street lamp,

under the moon and the Seven Sisters,
I spoke my truth and the world spun

into existence. There’s more than one way
to measure time. I traveled ten years

of night and two full moons.
Perhaps the world ends here.