Some evenings,
when the shadow of the ridge has covered me,
I walk to the top of the field, each step
an act of will if it's been a good day
with the crowbar and the hammer,
still the kind of work I like best,
except for the night to follow,
to sit in a small grove of young locusts
and listen to the frogs recite their lines,
jeered by the local geese in their sunset circuit,
and wait for the planets to appear.
Some evenings,
when I wait long enough,
I enter the deepening sky and find myself
sailing through the rings of Saturn in perfect
silence, bright in the immaculate dark,
as it comes back to me, the beauty
and the terror of being lost in space,
and I try to get it down, what it was like,
the crowbar and the hammer work of poetry,
and how can I not think of you
as the stars start to shine in their recession?
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| NASA via Reuters |
