Star Sequence | Part I.

I.

Allegro: The Astronomer Speaks

In the chill of this infernal hallway I have scratched
a name, mine usually, or an inspiration, seldom mine,
making of it a kind of archive, my own.
When the sun is up again, I shall be down
in my own uncomfortable dreams and remembrances of light.
When the stars rise again, I rise to find
that the Brothers have gone on bended knee and erased
my epistles: the obscene calculations, the improbable
and heretical theories which are my one prayer
of outliving myself.

Brother, it is my profession
to wait patiently, to read the signs, to discover in darkness
what cannot be seen under the sun. And Brother, do you know
I have grown afraid of the night. My senses frozen
with thoughts of drifting in the ether, I fall
from Polaris to the houses of our brothers and find
a parallel between their candles and those points of light
that we call planets but not other worlds.
I am afraid of the dark. Their houses are lost
in the darkness of the light years between us;
I think perhaps the lenses are too weak.
When dawn nears, I follow Draco's tail down

to a certain widow's house and I sleep.