Should Neither Repetitions Nor Variations End

If you’re used to city stars
Or suburban, small-town stars,
You can recognize a few

Of the big constellations—
The Dipper and Orion
For instance—but then it’s weird

To find them on a clear night
In dark skies, sharing the stage
With thick crowds of lesser lights

Filling the gaps around them.
Likewise, the space telescope
Keeps producing new pictures

Of familiar entities
Sparklingly detailed, but now
Attended by curious

Crowds of red ghost galaxies
Billions of light years distant,
Like a concert audience

Glimpsed over a star’s shoulder,
Glimmering, packing dim space.
Whether or not they’re watching,

Paying any attention,
Possessed of motivations
Of their own, it’s unsettling

That each time your eyes adjust
There’s just more and more and more.
Sure you really want to know?

Meton’s Curved Kanon

The poetry in those days,
Those far-off days, was sometimes
Handwritten and usually

It smelled rather queer, he said.
He went on to other things—
Spycraft, wealth-protection schemes—

Left behind, his magazine
Now reprints those poems on screens.
Don’t write poems at all, we said.

First, compose them in your head.
Then send codes in binary
Somewhere they’ll never find them.

It’s funny which jokes survive,
Which rules, which names carry on.
Train’s left for Cloud Cuckoo Land,

But models still circulate
Like Christmas starter-kit sets
Underneath the evergreen.

Earth Is an Instar

Lonely only for arriving early
In the twig tips of one spiraling arm
Of one crown in the crowded canopy,

But ready to start eating what’s in reach.
Fuzzy-headed, well-camouflaged monster
Of hungry, hungry mouthparts, blending in

With all the other light-catching patterns
Tossing in the stellar wind, it bites down
On the uninfected, gall-free planets

In the immediate vicinity.
It’s just getting started. Divinity
Couldn’t yet notice the gaps in the leaves,

But it won’t be forever before night
Starts looking tatty from other instars
Growing fat, battening on their systems.

For this universe, it’s just seasonal,
Another round in the contest between
Star furnaces and life. The planets molt

To mate as enormous, drapery-winged
Angels darkening bare-armed galaxies,
Then fall but leave their seeds so it repeats.

Instantaneous Depreciation of Paper

A box of books of poetry,
One poet’s name on all the spines—

A personal accomplishment,
A general futility.

Bandwidth

It’s a fond device
Of science pieces
To stress how little

Of the universe
Your senses perceive—
Less light than the bees,

Less sound than the bats,
And nothing of all
Magnetic wonders.

That’s not your problem.
Your problem is that,
Given your senses,

Such as they are, you
Tend to ignore them
Except when they go.

Love those pathetic
Sensations you’ve got,
The glow in the clouds

The scent of wet dirt
And coffee brewing
On a street corner

With crickets and cars
And broken concrete
Where you stand, balanced

A moment. This dims
Soon enough and goes,
What’s more than you’ll know.

Empty House

One hard part of knowing
You make your own meanings
Is that much of you wants

Meanings just to be there.
How can you find meaning
In life if you make it,

If you know you spin it,
Your own silk, obsessive
As those spiders that coat

Whole bookshelves in webbing
Advertising how few
Chances are left for flies?