celestial lights

I don't know why the heart, my friend, in its coiled musculature

and knot of soft tissue and sinew keeps on in you and me and

that lone flycatcher pillaging the rye grass, or those shrilling

 

crickets or the croakers in the marsh now starting their evening

doo wop or the Black Angus, like a procession of mourners,

dragging their shadows up from the creek before they buck and run

 

at our approach. Or the sun, now evanescing in the dusk, arteries

streaked across the western sky, what moves it in space, across

our retinas and into the convolutions of memory? I'm lost again

 

in the unbroken backbeat, my friend, perpetual in my adoration.

Follow me, if you will, up this ridge road, past the horse farm

and relay towers, with their daisy chains of red lights, pulsating

 

to warn away planes. I love how the landscape ripples away

in every direction, a tapestry we might float above

or disappear into, a dotting of yardlights like votive candles,

 

fields and valleys flowing away into darkness. We have come

this far to see the northern auroras, if conditions are right,

so we pick our fenceposts to watch the heavens fill with stars:

 

the empty dipperful, the seven daughters of Pleiades, a trillion

more I'll never know the names of as fireflies begin to luminesce

and drift about us. We wait and watch, you patient and content

 

to lick your paws, incarnation of the Buddha, I sometimes think,

here to shame my lack of virtue. And when wild dogs or

coyotes howl miles away, you tip your head up toward me with such

 

melancholy in your eyes I know whatever life dwells inside you

longs to cross the dark ocean that separates man from dog,

two animal souls on this hill searching the distant horizon

for arcs of light, like glowing fingers, to appear and touch us.

 

--Miguel de Ozarko

 

Done