Light-years

It’s a beautiful world, you said,

with these trees, marshes, deserts,

grasses, rivers and seas

and so on. And the moon is really something

in its circuits

of relative radiance. Include

the wingèd M, voluptuous

Venus, hotheaded Mars, that lucky devil

J and cranky Saturn, of course, plus

U and N and the wanderer P, in short

the whole solar family, complete with its

Milky Way, and count up all the other

systems with dots and spots and in

that endless emptiness what you’ve got

is a commotion of you-know-what. It’s a beautiful

universe, you said, just take a good look

through the desert’s dark glasses

for instance or on your back

in seas of grass, take a good look

at the deluge of that Rorschach—we’re standing out there

somewhere, together.