A blue white glow near a red star
fuzzy lint on a black, spangled shirt
the hint of a tail, like the vapor that spreads
from my mouth in the cold night air.
As I watch your progress, infinitely slow and large against my tiny, quick motion
my eye adapts to your distant pace,
sees your cloud flickering, roiling in the dark.
Look long enough, and between blinks
I glimpse the flash of an angry yellow eye within that billowing mass:
from thousands of miles away, it glares once
and vanishes back into mist.
Rock or ice, falling through the black emptiness
pulled toward our sun in mindless gravitational attraction
you burn, you flare, passing.
You leave this smoky smudge to show us where you have been.
Yet already you are gone;
my eye sees only light reflected from a body now vanished
already further on its fiery path to a cold vacuum ending.
So have I flared, time and again
in some hopeless love,
my body hurtling helpless toward yet another sun, another star
scattering a tail of poems, or stories, or letters behind me.
Scribbled diaries and computer printouts follow my arc
across the sky of another addiction
my desire already run ahead, leaving thought behind in my pages
and only the void waiting for the end.
The sound of distant traffic rises from between the trees
at the bottom of my yard.
My feet feel the cold wood of the deck beneath them.
Watching your motionless flight, curling my arms tighter against my body,
I stand safe within the orbit of my family
and long to burn once again
to whirl in centrifugal circles around another fiery planet.
I dream I might drop,
plunging without atmosphere,
flung from this home into the indifferent night
my heat seeking a like heat, to blaze and spark
until I am spent, an ashen lump,
a ball of ice once more.
In what void shall I find myself, then?
Or is the void merely my heart
cold and austere, the empty center of me
that cries always to be filled?
3/27/96