The Stars
written by: Rhett Talley
I seek the stars at dusk.
Anticipate the tiny nocturnal things
As they emerge to forage on blackness
In silence the mind assigns them.
Each night new constructions,
Devices of language, ornaments of tongue:
The ruby orb of war,
The azure face of Ishtar,
Orion’s dazzling belt.
And tonight –
Oh, how the dim spark mocks the incredulous eye!
Oh, the task the eye apprehends!
For meaning must the eye assign
To incomprehensible vastness
Or else the conjecture of the fingertip collapses
And then the fall of man.
This is the theory.
For the brain will not flinch in its assay:
It is as cool as a spy.
The logarithm of precedent is scrutinised
While within the meat the electric trickery
Like a Houdini moves its neural fingers
And voila! The values roll off our tongue quick as curses.
The Habilines gaining the summit of Kilimanjaro
Beheld a world beyond they understood
As children of the earth.
But when the dusk began to bulge and flicker
Into the darkening sky each gazed in thrall
Until the poet among them issued new utterance.
It is this I would address:
Do not believe in the silence of the star
Until it is confronted.
Nor its benign and tiny bulk:
The star is the godhead of mass itself
And seethes with malignancy
And to it thine eye is but an atom
Quite close by.
The star’s silence is a broken premise.
And that’s how these things get started.
And in whispered re-telling are become
Like the rosy-fingered dawn
That hasn’t a hand but a tongue.
We are here. The star is there. Between,
The void and the reflex of sentience to speak.
The eye abhors nihility.
The mind will not endure it.
The linguist starts and stops her study here.
None are speechless at the altar of the black expanse.
Even the crow will caw, the wolf will howl.
Man will say a word or two.
I will say it:
The mind is the child of the universe
The daughter of the star
Conceived to know itself its kin
Through a dialogue of metaphor
Toiling ever slavishly
Under a whipping tongue.
