way out in the distant open,
where stars burn
in their stable courses,
nothing but the hissing of
combusted gases
breaks the silence

so much of the universe
is unlivable
so why is it littered
with detail
so fine that the best
our scientists can do
is guess and run their
calculations once,
and once again?

+

pitiable love consumes it's
daughters,
pining after the last sweet
sigh of summer
as it bathes in winter's pain

hungry for bread
for the flesh of the dead,
and waking to groan in the
thousand-year night

simpering sailor of skies
spread like seas,
docks on the island,
the tomb of his breeze

hallowed howling, a temple's
gloom,
wolf and knife and priest
come soon

discovery comes sooner than the drowning
of day,
details unmask
but you knew where
they lay.

Deaf and mute and eyeless
stranger,
pilgrim from a foreign star
pitch your tent on the liar's island,
fuel your way from shore to shore

half-known visions cloud
the sky above,
stars and charts speak dim
and slow
flinging out solutions to the question never
asked
but always posed

why?

why these mysteries,
while scarlet ribbons flutter to the floor;
why these planet-spinning stars
when there is butter spread on bread;
why this life-defying silence,
when from the cradle of a thousand
infants, a thousand infants roar?

hilarity is not the mother nor the
cousin
to this beauty;
it's an apposite distinction
left out to laugh like
empty hulls hung
in wind.

No face is peering through the shutters
of the world,
no hand is sifting through the sea-shore
grit of galaxies left out
to spin amidst the ever-dancing
light

or so they say;
with odd and accurate
predictions that sustain
nothing                                                                                      
but denial
in the face of a world too vast and untamed to pretend for one moment that we all are not the most infinitely consequential of specks to hurtle through the dark and unforgiving void of space lit up with brilliant blues by a feathered mother sitting close and warm in the hatching heat of a nest that has not yet raised its eggs…

skies break open
far above
thunder dies on the ear
in the unforgiving roar
of the undoing
of this mortal shell.

Rejoice, dirt-dwellers, sun-begotten
creatures of the dust and breath of God;
thus the end shall come.