We Gaze with Hollow Eyes – at
The Eternal Puzzle of Starry skies²
Count your Stars – (Lucky or Not)³
Shake the yoke of the Inauspicious
Stars from this World-Wearied Flesh⁴
The sky is strewn with horrible Dead Suns,
Dense Sediment of Mangled Atoms – from
Which only Desperate Heaviness Emanates⁵
I envy everything outside the window except the
Stars – they are too Hot, too Far away, and Dying⁶
Why aren’t we more Amazed by the Constellations,
All those flung Stars held together by the thinnest
Filaments of our evolved, Image-Making Brains⁷
Keep looking back at the Star and the stars
Around it, until you feel the Earth Turning,
Until you become aware of how the Stars,
The World and the Soul move Together⁸
My body is Volatilized and Mingled: an
Imponderable Atom with Vast Vapours
Tracing flaming orbits through Infinity⁹
Ah, not to be cut off – not by the least
Wall, shut out from the Law of Stars¹⁰
¹ Percy Bysshe Shelley, Adonis
² Jidi Majia tr. Denis Mair, Hometown Cremation Ground
³ C.D. Wright, Count Your Fingers
⁴ William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
⁵ Primo Levi tr. Ruth Feldman & Brian Swann, The Black Stars
⁶ Alan Dugan, On Going Up to Surgery
⁷ Dorianne Laux, Third Rock From the Sun
⁸ Ursula K. Le Guin, Solitude
⁹ Jules Verne tr. Robert Baldick, Journey to the Center of the Earth
¹⁰ Rainer Maria Rilke tr. original, Ah, Not To Be Cut Off