The Sky at Night
Where grapeshot cut the rebel corn,
near Civil War homesteads standing
Sherman’s charge,
I was born,
joined now in time’s confederacy
along a slick of blacktop flanked
in ditch weed,
between those farms and this attendant cause,
heat shimmer…
I am eight, pulling faces
in the funhouse mirror −
pumpkin head, tiny feet, or toffee-stretched
thin as a last breath, thin as falling through
black-hole horizons.
An observer could confirm it, falling
through theorems into nothing, nothing,
and more of it, thin
and thinner still and then the ghost of thin.
Yet, for the one who is falling, everything the same,
the beating heart and dream that you had died,
everything bathed in energy:
this desk
not less than fire-grate flames, my hand,
its shadow on the paper, every word, a museum piece
of frontiers and flags of tribes.
It was at the fair one summer,
garish animals locked
in circling music, the bottle greens and reds running
blurred as they went, the riders,
Dad and I, paired in fixed canter
to a puffing calliope.
He, dead these forty years,
and younger then than I am now.
The desk lamp winks, once, again, then out.
I tap its cobra hood − nothing.
Outside, above the porch, the night sky
positions its ephemera – Orion, midheaven
to the longer view.
In its degrees, I took the light
as constant, finding later, against matte black, the sword of
stars
vast, colder than we know.
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