Black Marble

Constancy? Tonight the peerless stars atonefor countless pinched & starless nights. We ride currents

of royal blue on our continental crust, safe as houses,safe in houses that perch on plains & hillsides—

or grip the sand & face the coastal tide, like seabirdsfierce into the gale. This hold—the lithic earth below

our feet—grounds & keeps us. Metamorphic rockspans down, hardly fragile, yet when sleep declines

to come, I recall the earth we've known these forty years,a waif, transformed in space—& lonelier than Lucifer mid-fall—& how

the frosted breath of clouds obscured bronze fleets of landso thin they seemed the barest scraps of hide. Or something more

like wafers of flint & splintered rock, our tiny rafts—we their castaways.

Polestar, we say, meaning one who guides us, & we navigate by stars,wish upon them, name constellations after gods

& pouty boys—& by dint of that know ourselves substantial.But this laptop's glowing portal, companion in my wakeful nights,

spins me from the photographed Blue Marble to thesenight versions, each a seeming vision of the stars, moon-arc'd

by a protective curve of light. They are not stars, but city lights.Whispered myths, human comedies winking in the black—

disobedience, sweet love affairs, heroics, all ephemeral &—That & all our quest is mirrored back.