The Astronomy of Language

 

In my dream I try to see with the old light of stars.

How can their past brilliance be my present illumination?

My neck craned upward, I feel the earth

incrementally giving to the weight of my bare feet,

as if drawing away from the tinder lights of the sky. 

 

The grass stays cool, never warming under my soles.

The call of an owl inhabits the moonless air of the night,

a portal to deeper wildness and the warm, skittering chaos 

of the creature world.

 

The darkness of space travels to my eyes, too.

But at the speed of light?

Or do I myself provide the absence of light?

Thus I receive the bluish, white pinpricks of the stars.

Gentle stings of infinity.

 

Light-years hang on my face like tears.

Do these ancient echoes of fission make me a mythical being

because I see the splay of the old Greek gods

marked off with sparklers, cast aloft

by the ever-belated compassion of Zeus?

 

Or are we both curious phenomena of astrophysics?

 

I hover in the wonder of worlds unnumbered. 

Tell me, or tell the stars, or tell Jesus that we are metaphors,

a cheap eternity of coy words.

 

The black of the sky is not really as black as the pupil of my eye;

the tiny black hole that receives the crystal words of the stars.

 

Exploding from their cores in all directions with all their might—

being and yet extinguishing themselves through being,

these star words write fathomless poems above me.

 

All the same, I hear the rolling resonances of distant bursts in the eonic darkness…

 

So, wake me up when music falls out of the skies

and meteors rain down in August.

I will lie down in the grass on my back

and be the Orion or Queen Cassiopeia of the earth

and let the night heavens wonder at me.

 

Then I will know that we have learnt the astronomy of language.

 

Abbie Conant

Talhausen, Germany

April 28, 2014