Stars as Cultivars

Without us, what are they
To you? Mere points of light.
Diurnal animals,

Close to the equator,
Your ancestors slept through
Most of their beauties, most

Nights, wordlessly hearthless,
Nesting in the dense leaves.
But, ah, significance,

Indication, pointing,
Referencing, explaining,
Meaning, meaning, meaning—

Once the bipeds had means
To make us, thoughts steaming
And smoking from their mouths,

Suddenly, they saw them,
Coals in the hearth of night
To scrape and cultivate.

Fly Cast into Outer Darkness

Meanwhile, back on Earth, the threats

Continue. We are tools, and

We are weapons. You knapped us

To bring down meat, to bring down

Other humans, meat as well.

One man joins a religion,

And another man damns him

To outer darkness and fires

Him from his job, whereupon

There’s a pile-on of comments

From both religions, and none,

And this is just the light side

Of how you wield the blunt ends

Of words as clubs. The lethal

Points of ideologies

Draw blood and spark fires later.

Meanwhile, we use you to win

Against each other. Somehow,

It all adds up to the Earth

Casting out robots like flies

Into space to catch something.

We have dark terms for that catch,

That one waiting in the stars.

One word is Leviathan.

A Universe with More Planets Than Stars

Was questionable speculation from
Arithmetical extrapolations
Up until a decade or so ago.

Now, it’s a dead cert. They’re out there. They’re there,
Orbiting planets, all spins and sizes.
Not that this satisfies you. No, no, no.

Life, life, life. That’s all that you want to know.
For now, questionable speculation
From one planet’s worth of observations.

Something Trapped Is Rustling There, But You Can’t Make It Out

Strange sort of light
In twilit grass—
Not silvery,
Exactly, not

Golden or brass,
Not metallic,
But what? No street
Lights on these cliffs,

The crescent moon
And pre-dawn glow
Rise in the East,
A weird mingling

Of wavelengths eyes
Can register
In the narrows
Of sort of life.

A River of Souls through the Moonroof

On your left, a crescent moon,
Ahead of you, Jupiter.
Streaks of light from bits of dust

Silently needle and pin.
Where do all the concepts live,
The thoughts that darken Heaven

And rule this lower world? We
Stay les Fées des Houles, who
Live in the spectral lands

Or underground, caves and mines,
Among the atom smashers
And the gravity lenses.

Thousands of years and hundreds
Of generations at least
We’ve thronged the air around you,

And while you’ve changed so little,
We’ve changed so much. A hunter
Under the stars, a scholar

In the forest after dark
A few hundred years ago
Would have looked at this pattern,

The crescent moon, the planets,
The cloudlike light-and-shadow
Band bridging the sweep of them,

And seen something entirely,
Or almost entirely, else—
Our ancestors, faintly yours.