The Heavy Light of Shifting Stars

THE HEAVY LIGHT OF SHIFTING STARS / Michael Collier Sometimes the nite is the shape of a ear only it ain't a ear we know the shape of. —Russell Hoban Riddley Walker The huge magnanimous stars are many things. At night we lower window shades to mute the sparkling circuitry of the universe; at day the sun's clear mist, like a beautiful cabinetry, shrouds the workings of the sky. Everything is hidden, everything is apparent, so that light coming toward us, held in the faces of our old regrets, is blue; while the light passing away, blurred by our stationary focus, is red. We cannot see these colors with our eyes, just as we cannot feel the sun pushing the stars outward or bending the paths of their light. Years ago when the world was flat, and then even when the world became round, light was light, dark was dark, and now, now that the world is almost nothing compared with all that is— all that we know—light identified each atom of the universe, and darkness swallows stars like a whirlpool at the heart of a galaxy. The huge magnanimous stars are many things. We look to the sky and ask, What has changed? Everything. But nothing we can see, and our seeing changes nothing, until we move, and moving we become the light of our atoms moving. The Missouri Review · 149 ...