Negotiating Versions of Forever

The captain's voice marks the comet banked in the right windows
the way a tour bus driver notes marbled landmarks, imploding
cathedrals. It's motionless: as if we'd stalled in a tunnel, veering
off from the light. But that's one more cliché
of the after, repetition taken as verification, discounting
the equal similarity of alien encounters, storied faces all eyes
and the absence of color. Thirty million miles long, the tail's
contained in this view. The toy
constructions below have been lost in an electric web
since sunset, and somewhere down there, snapping off
a splinter of light with microscopic fingers, he's left
in a minute fragment of this night I feel as a first cell wavering
the brink of division, tumor or fetus, nothing yet
determined but the inevitable
multiplication. Nothing's set
but in motion: landing's an arrival at illusion
of destination attained while driving
any asphalt version of forever depends
on a limit to vision, constellations on worn
angles of gazing. We've been there before. The retired sailor
brought back from his holiday cruise slide
after slide of waves. Nostalgia made them real, gave them currency
beyond the play of light and shadow patterning the drywall.
So what if there are barriers, cosmic
mental roadblocks, if forest is ultimately
lost on the trees, leaving unaccounted for
the lather of dogwoods, foaming wave half mast to pines
half way to twilight and the already-appearing comet's
arc of astral ice and dust, moving toward infinity
like all good versions of the beautiful, the lover's face
dutifully passing beyond precision
everywhere but in memory's dark runway creased
and broken with lights. The scientific
explanation for yesterday's rainbow braiding the yard
irrelevant as language in this night, him a thousand
unwired miles down, I constellate our brief history,
tracking as polestars what may be random
pulses of perfection: the red-eye's blackout eclipsed by reversing
the serial arrival of spring - dogwoods, cherries, Bradford pears - back
to original sign, forsythia's golden bush igniting
that divine burn.