suspiration of the cold flossing the invisible
tides of air, full with all our lost breath . . .
Soon the heavens will span out - and though
I've learned everything is falling outward,
the galaxies still come set like pin feathers
spired on the dark's spread wings . . .
This time of year, before a brief twilight
turns away, I think of Tiepolo's cherubim,
all countenance and wing, bodiless among
the clouded wisps, breaking away, floating
off like anything souls might be - I think
of our lives drifting out there too, like slow
light through these blue and trembling trees.
Only a hundred thousand years ago
mastodons grazed in Central Park,
and the constellations spun over them
gently as shining leaves - the dark pools,
the staves of ice singing back the mild
ostinato of the stars . . .
We've tried to figure
our place in the far backwaters and
sequinned outskirts of time, tried to pin down
that one background note reverberating
even in the rocks. But the tumbling
geometry of the sky resolves little more
than those chiseled blocks of light,
those overlays of rust and amber
that were all of an autumn thickening
the air, absolving some distances until we felt
we could take that burning it into us.
Nonetheless,
I'm watching Venus rise through the diminished
atmosphere of New Jersey, red as a maple leaf
I've taped above the window to keep my hope
in perspective, for still I'm not much beyond
that feeling at age two when my father,
on a fire escape in east Missouri, lifted me
into the cool, blue night of the 50s,
and I pointed saying, moon, moon,
as it basked there large and white
as a beach ball spinning just beyond
my arm's reach . . .
And each year now
we know more, but we know no better -
what we see in the sky is simply
the softened gloss of the past sifting
back to us, and likewise, every atom
down the body's shining length
was inside a star, and will be again.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
by Christopher Buckley, 1989
