The sky is strewn with horrible dead Suns:
Dense sediment of mangled atoms,
From which only desperate heaviness emanates—²
I envy everything outside the window except the stars:
They are too Hot, too Far away, and Dying.³
Shake the yoke of the inauspicious stars
From this world-wearied Flesh!⁴
We gaze with hollow eyes,
At the eternal puzzle of the starry skies;⁵
Why aren’t we more amazed by the Constellations:
All those flung stars held together by the thinnest
Filaments of our evolved, image-making brains?⁶
Count your Stars (lucky or not) …⁷
Our body is volatilized and mingled:
An imponderable atom with vast vapours
Tracing flaming orbits through Infinity—⁸
Keep looking back at a 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 together:⁹
Ah, not to be cut off—not by the least partition,
Shut out from the Law of the Stars!¹⁰
¹ Percy Bysshe Shelley, Adonis
² Primo Levi tr. Ruth Feldman & Brian Swann, The Black Stars
³ Alan Dugan, On Going Up to Surgery
⁴ William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
⁵ Jidi Majia tr. Denis Mair, Hometown Cremation Ground
⁶ Dorianne Laux, Third Rock From the Sun
⁷ C.D. Wright, Count Your Fingers
⁸ Jules Verne tr. Robert Baldick, Journey to the Center of the Earth
⁹ Ursula K. Le Guin, Solitude
¹⁰ Rainer Maria Rilke tr. original, Ah, Not To Be Cut Off