The Star Is Not the Tenor

Astronomers and astronomy

Buffs are fond of assigning nicknames

To interstellar phenomena,

Most often based on faint resemblance

Of a pattern to some well-known thing

From human experience on Earth,

A seagull, for instance, or a crab.

Surprisingly, no one’s yet nicknamed

This galactic disemboweling

Of one NGC by another,

That is, seventy-seven fourteen

Torn by seventy-seven fifteen,

Which, in colorful Hubble pictures,

Looks remarkably like an image

Of an embryo in utero,

Like an extravagant scaling up

Of recapitulation theory

All the way to the cosmic level.

Of course, astronomers talk about

Stars being born, quite casually,

As if it were hardly metaphor,

Identifying star nurseries

As matter-of-factly as frogspawn

Identified floating in a pond.

All perfectly understandable,

The sources being more familiar

Than the targets they illuminate,

But temporally, shouldn’t it be

The other way around, things on Earth

Like birth and death, graves and nurseries

As analogous to combustions

In the night skies that preceded them?

No? Fine. The embryo galaxy.

Planning for the Future in the Past

It’s called scheduling,
Making a schedule.
Do it, and it looks

Like future pre-planned,
The future made past.
But it’s only when

Things go according
To schedule, to plan—
The school year begins,

The planes get airborne,
The army marches,
The bombs start to fall,

The concert concludes,
Elections are held,
The conference ends—

People get seduced
Into trying it
Again and again,

Until they believe,
Sure, it’s their future
Fossilized in plans.

The Smash Up

Sex is an accident, wrote Eva Gore-Booth,

Who was correct, and that’s not the half of it.

Sex is a bafflement, to students of it,

Uncertain why life forms have or haven’t it.

It can come as simply as gene-mingling yeast,

Or turn ridiculously elaborate

As plant species dioecious and monoecious

In one life, or as genital counterfeits.

There’s no absolutely convincing reason

Any life should try sex and not simply split

The way all lives managed for billions of years,

As most one-celled organisms manage it,

As somatic cells still do, even in whales,

And what makes this accident so persistent?

Dim Monsters Move

Maybe doomscrolling demonstrates something
More than manipulated compulsion.
Maybe you know the real news is moving
Somewhere under all the breaking clamor,
And you know you’re not glimpsing it, you know
You’re missing something and must keep looking.

Old news outlets often run side hustles
In which they market the news of the day
Of your birth. Even given retrospect,
You’ll notice it’s generally not much
Of anything really significant,
And anything you sense between the lines
You attend to thanks to the surrounding
Decades of context. Still, in the lines’ cage . . .

What Do You Mean We

People love their ancestry,
And people are resentful,
Hostile, or condescending

With regard to ancestries
They don’t perceive as their own.
It’s a little thrill to claim

Individual villains
Perched in the family tree,
But, on the whole, your people

Triumphed by perseverance,
An inherent quality,
While suffering wickedness

From other kinds of people,
Against whom they persevered.