Poetry | March 01, 1989
The Heavy Light of Shifting Stars
This poem was selected as Poem of the Week (Jan. 21, 2008).
The Heavy Light of Shifting Stars
Sometimes the nite is the shape
of a ear only it ain’t a ear
we know the shape of.
-Russell Hoban
Riddley Walker
The huge magnanimous stars are many things.
At night we lower window shades
to mute the sparkling circuitry of the universe;
at day the sun’s clear mist, like a beautiful
cabinetry, shrouds the workings of the sky.
Everything is hidden, everything is apparent,
so that light coming toward us, held
in the faces of our old regrets, is blue;
while the light passing away, blurred
by our stationary focus, is red.
We cannot see these colors with our eyes,
just as we cannot feel the sun pushing the stars
outward or bending the paths of their light.
Years ago when the world was flat, and then even
when the world became round, light was light,
dark was dark, and now, now that the world
is almost nothing compared with all that is-
all that we know-light identified each atom
of the universe, and darkness swallows stars
like a whirlpool at the heart of a galaxy.
The huge magnanimous stars are many things.
We look to the sky and ask, What has changed?
Everything. But nothing we can see, and our seeing
changes nothing, until we move, and moving
we become the light of our atoms moving.
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