A Broken Compact

like the Doppler reading suddenly shifted into the blue

Galaxy only a skeleton

Of terribly dim, elderly stars,

Distant, red-shifted blur of garnet

Like a diffuse ghost photobombing

Deep sky portraits, a smear at the back

Of the cavernous room of all rooms,

Wait! What are you doing? What is that?

How are you suddenly shifting blue?

You’ve thrown our world into a tizzy.

We look up from our famines and wars,

Our hypocritical politics,

All the politics we have at all.

Confounding all known cosmologies,

Receding Deep Time has reversed course.

There’s an ancient, early galaxy

Charging contrary to the cosmos,

Incredibly far away from us,

Still, but now coming for us, closing.

Ten billion years, the newscasters laugh,

A little too hysterically,

Ten billion years until it hits us.

But here’s the thing—yesterday it was

Headed away from us, then it turned.

What’s to say more distant wraiths won’t turn,

And then closer ghosts, too? What’s to say

The universe won’t reverse, shift blue,

Contract itself, compact all of you?