Graphene

Between the eye and what the eye sees is seeing. 
The light that knots believers to God is the slenderest thread.
To kiss is not a kiss, as easily blown to one’s beloved on a breath
as put upon a mouth, a forehead, a hand, a breast, and ever
without a measurable mark, a remnant to be weighed. None are
counted by that counting that measures least to be Graphene
(or rewarded, as the case may be). Perhaps it’s simply what
doesn’t stick. Graphene would not have been refined into this
thinnest wonder were it not for methodology: tape on tape
transferring the shadow of it, stronger than the shade
of trees or buildings or anything made of not-Graphene. 

            But without a Cossack to make more of it, 
            to find a sticky stuff to shred the wind, 
            the light, the water to which ships go down 
            and elemental that bends us to the eternal 
            flux of one into another, who can know 
            how much more likely to plumb and set 
            upright the world is what we have not yet 
            refined: transparent, so we cannot see. 

Graphene is the thinnest, strongest thing (if you believe
the recent progeny of science), a Philosopher’s Stone
and alchemy of magicians less likely than Newton
or da Vinci or the Greeks. A single atom deep, 
deeper than previous physicists could reach, 
imagination Scotch Taped by improbable geeks, 
the fin of a serpent of a sea so much increased 
the ancients named it “Deep” and warned us 
by charts (after anyone had other use of them 
to go to sea in ships or wonder at the edges 
of the world): “Beyond here there be serpents.” 

            Serpents are the stuff of the unseen: 
            eChrist and Lucifer, both of whom we keen. 
            When Moses lifted up his staff to part the sea, 
            the miracle was what might have been, war 
            and victory or defeat the intention of a serpent. 
            “Beyond here there be dragons,” which have wings,
            whose gift is not treasure or to fly or to define 
            the limit of things, but the mystery of having seen. 

Even if you could find wetter water into 
which to cast and deeper seas, Graphene 
is a net too unlikely to catch fish or squid, 
neither copper nor iron nor true alchemy, 
but our most recent most thing: most strong, 
most thin, most least, making of it mostly 
air, as is the most of all of us, the empty 
in-between that makes us most like everything.