The Wild Stars

Every person on earth
walks their entire life back and forth
underneath the stars, but it seems as if
some never look up.

Babies crane their necks when they notice for the
first time the
ceiling’s been replaced by
sprinkling lights of heavens, hot white pinpoints
beaming down through the sieve of
dark in titillating dots. Things with

wings of various
sizes and velocities pass
by under its
concave canopy. Lions pounce on gazelles and
quietly gnaw fresh flesh by moonlight under
the fierce intensity of the night sky.

Hut-smoke curls gray snakes of fuzziness in
tiny wriggling threads up into the sparkling blanket of
the sky as it
curves entirely
around the globe.

A speck of three-masted boat in the moonlit sheen of open sea
has within it, the size of
microbes, intelligent mites looking out through
telescopes and calculating with
astrolabes in order to reach
shore on schedule. The stars, the

silent stars are their counselors.

A bead of water on marble, imperfectly
round, heavier at the
bottom, actually reflects
all the visible heavens and all the visible
stars on the
surface of its sides without any
visible effort, even
catching their progress from
horizon to
horizon before
evaporating un-immortally away.

On the blackened circular
surface of the
coffee in your coffee cup many of the
same stars are
mirrored. You drink their
light with your last
satisfied gulp.

Why do you hide the stars inside you?
The wild stars.

Why do you turn down their light?

---

12/9/89 (from A Maddening Disregard for the Passage of Time)

Categories: Poems