You Be the Judge

(after Francis Thompson)

Imagine a night sky in the Barrens
      without the North Star.

Imagine that Zeus had never thrown
      Callisto into the sky,
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Orchards hang in the evening air,
splayed along alluvial bottomland
like sagging, vast, corporeal mists,
ordered rows of sentient sentinels.

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I come not to you with words of wisdom
      but with words that unseal doors
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On a dark star-filled night
I step outside long after
the town retires and gaze
upward, dogged stillness
the analogesic to my soul.
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You
know the
feeling: waking
up staring to
the right where
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Take these incendiaries with you on the trail:
let the words themselves be fat and resinous;
impregnate the charcoaled ink with paraffin;
and may the whole be written upon the scroll
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I pause and breathless gasp at stars
which loose ten thousand brilliant shafts
through narrowed iris, fluoresce cones.

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Come, gather ’round
and square your minds
with an aquiline profile
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