Star Strider
by Tricia Wagner
A tribute to New Horizons and the dawning of Pluto on the eyes of humankind
North of nowhere,
stars advance,
firestorms of other worlds,
they rage,
and we are lost in them.
Starsong shivers from invisible peaks,
capped with coal clouds
obliterated in the black belly of an absent sun.
Rafters holding starborn choruses and bells
are grazed by the golden notice of snowy owls,
touched just by wingtips,
soaring,
lost in the wilds of flying through the winds of many suns.
Star wings shade your reddened cheeks with blue,
weaken knees that bend to touch the arc of the Earth
in exaltation.
An angel flies; a star,
and you are lost.
Disintegration.
Time and motion sweep memories from your soul
and take away the sky.
A moment of clarity.
A rising round of ice and dust,
and you are found,
someplace.
Kneeling in the mist that hangs across the heavy moon,
blanching with the cold of creeping night,
we watch for sylphs too old to bear a name.
Tendrils of foreign atmospheres curl over each shoulder,
the weight of the universe bolstered by your frame,
a mind thinking,
laden with questions
and dreams,
seeking for the reach of another,
some mind ascending, crossing distant, dusky seas,
to cry an answer to the question posed
of whether or not to be.
Chins uplift.
Mouths unlatch,
gaping to swallow; to speak,
or to breathe,
if breathing comes
by vapor pressed from swollen cheeks
of cosmic clouds,
leaching metals and fire and smoke
into your lungs.
Clear oxygen resolves inside of spaces
separating bodies,
the elemental thoughts of other minds.
Today we are unsure what light conceals,
bright matches striking fires from the past
and from the greatest fields;
a meteor skimming surfaces,
plunging through intangible mediums
full of liquid emptiness and nothing.
You, standing on the tip of Earth.
All of time has come to this.
The hammer strikes of molten stone;
the shuttering of rocks into churning waters;
the rumbling of the Earth through space,
rolling; unridden;
solitary in the many moments stars were spinning.
Will there be an ear to hear?
Can a starstrike have a voice;
a nighttime, an anthem?
The greatest dreams compound:
the densities of neutron stars.
Newtonian physics is one thing,
but a legend spoken out of dark energy and solar flares is another.
The gentleness that slips through grasses
pushing at our feet,
striding lost in avenues of space,
these are chemical memories;
the sighted sharp and black unknown.
One star, so bright,
speaking in a language we have never understood,
the rhythm of a wheeling world,
vacant, maybe,
is constant.
The song of the galactic poet, though,
is aberrant; asymmetry; strange.
Akin to the soul encased inside a human skull.
The Earth, sweeping debris,
wearing crowns of miasmic stars,
rolls around the iron sun.
Before our eyes,
stars fall.
Lost in the deeps of countries unfathomable,
except by stretches of unmeasured time,
a heart contracts on a white landscape,
crimsoned by alien ore and dimpled by pocks of vapored ice.
It simmers in all desolation
beneath an indigo shell,
an echo of Earth trees, breathing.
Colors streak through places that were absent.
Flukes curl over one horizon, sinking through shores of snow
into we know not what submersion.
There is no east and no west to mark the course of the flag-runner,
rushing past,
or screaming past, had it a mouth.
But eyes it has,
and a memory,
and telepathy.
Minute by minute,
electric signals tremble back to Earth;
impressions of the passageways through many worlds.
Water worlds.
Winged worlds.
Worlds of aether.
Worlds of gemstones.
Presence… declension… arrival
scatters on the pages before bespectacled souls, vigilant.
The destination? Forever.
***THE END***
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