Cosmos Unearthed

It has the feeling of weather remembered by something other than a person. A disturbance seems to have passed through and stayed, with no clear division between the event and its record.

Several versions of a place seem to meet here. None quite explains the others. What looks continuous from a distance becomes, up close, a series of disagreements that have learned to coexist.

Change has not reached every part equally. There are pockets that seem ahead of the rest and places that hold back. The edge between them is difficult to call finished.

Each boundary seems to remember another. A place can change its shape without entirely losing the shapes it used to have. Here, no single outline gets the final word.

An entrance seems to be offered, then offered again farther in. There is no visible barrier. Still, the distance between seeing an opening and being able to enter it feels considerable.

Layer after layer leads toward a part that remains withheld. Perhaps the opening is the subject; perhaps it is only where the subject stops. Neither possibility quite resolves the view.

Two beginnings, each making room for what follows. Their resemblance suggests a shared course, but the points of arrival do not coincide. Returning need not mean coming back to the same place.

A record with its units missing. We could count the intervals and still have no idea how long anything took.

Which came first matters, though there is no certain way to tell. Read in one order, it is an interruption; in another, a repair. Both accounts fit the available evidence.

A slight shift seems capable of producing a different account of the same place. The divisions are definite, but what belongs on either side feels surprisingly easy to reconsider.

A break does not erase the thing that held together. It makes that earlier state imaginable. The divisions here feel less like an ending than a condition the whole has had to accommodate.

There are places we seem to recognize without having been to them. A few suggestions are enough: the eye supplies a distance, then a memory for which there is no occasion.

This could be somewhere seen from a great height, or something held very close. The eye begins mapping it anyway, drawing distinctions that might disappear the moment a scale is supplied.

The surface appears to be deciding what sort of place it will become. A direction almost establishes itself, then folds into another. Nothing here looks ready to be given an address.

Enough landmarks to imagine a journey, and just enough interruption to lose our bearings before discovering whether this is a place we could cross in a step or never cross at all.

There seems to be more distance inside this than its boundaries should allow. A few visible passages tempt the eye inward. Most of the place remains unavailable, however close we come.

Up, unless it is down. The route is meticulously offered; a place to arrive is another matter.

It is easy to imagine a place here and then wonder who could inhabit it. The impression lasts despite the absence of anything made for a body like ours.

The edge gives us something to measure by, then falls away. What follows could be shallow or immense. Looking farther does not bring the bottom any closer to being known.

Nothing is moving, yet it is difficult not to imagine a crossing under way. The distances are unreadable. What appears to be far apart might have been touching all along.

A small beginning keeps making room beyond itself. Each new space retains a relation to the first, even as that first space becomes harder to reach. Expansion has a memory.

For a moment, looking becomes mutual. Knowing better does very little to undo that first impression.