Crouching next to an atom, a salt-eyed scientist
asked me what I thought to be the smallest thing in the universe
and I answered that an electron was small enough to sit upon his fingertips.
His smile was beautiful, like an iceberg after a snowfall of amber,
and he glowed in the lilac peace of the sunset as he took my hand
and taught me that the absence of gravity meant that we could leap the asteroid belt.

Once, he tried to teach me to skim stones so far that they would tumble
off the edge of the earth, if there were such a thing.
He had weeping-willows for arms and couldn’t throw far enough
and neither could I, but now, at least, we both knew the theory.
When we ran out of pebbles, we stood with our feet in the ash
and he explained that what we love the most will fly the farthest when thrown.

Wrapped in tissue, he gave me a crystal that he had made from sulphur.
When I told him that his presence made me fly, he smiled bewilderedly
and asked me whose, then, were those footprints alongside his?

He inhaled the quartz from the ocean air and stopped holding my hand
in case he loved me too much, afraid he should accidentally spin me
off the edge of the earth. Before I shrank to smaller than the atom,
I reminded him that his fingers had the intelligence to make chemicals twinkle
but not enough strength to throw stones past the breaking waves.

He whispered sadly that he was a scientist learning to breathe.
We held each other close and cried ourselves to dust
until our bodies crumbled into the hole in the earth
from where we found the stones that we had tried to skim to infinity.
Our tears became magnets and trickled towards the tide.