The Star Taker at Dawn in New Denver, 22 May 2019

The world doesn’t note anniversaries,
Despite its many oscillating parts. These
Patterned words of ours express a dementia
Spreading in our corner of the universe, but
The full mind of the universe is patternless.
Anything we can draw a circle around is
A game, Gödel. That’s why we can’t explain
Ourselves without reference to something
Outside we can’t explain. That’s our game,
Which is not nature, never, except our nature
Is game. Eleven years ago, yesterday, we fell.
We fell, we smashed like crockery on rocks,
All of us, all ghosts of these calendar poems,
The body, the self, the soul, the shadows
Of the mind: awareness, puppetry, thoughts,
And many of the words, but not daughter.
Daughter would come much later, in part
Because of that fall, the fall that forced us
To exit the desert, that lured us north, then
Far back down, around the world to marriage
In the Southern Hemisphere, then back here
To where daughter would be born at the end
Of half a century and one long northern year.
Personal history. Circular as an astrolabe,
As precise and forever slightly inaccurate
As the finest brass armillary sphere. Why
We keep dates, why we convince ourselves
They return, when at most they only rhyme,
Is a question for heaven, not for star takers.
The world is irreversible, is not a palindrome,
Not the ghost of a poem. Last morning, we
Woke up in pieces, bits of dream, memories,
Inexplicably overwrought emotions, germs,
Commensals, notions, parasites, the whole
Self-reassembling, woodsy, dark ecosystem,
And one thought in us focused obsessively
On the number one. One. Nothing is one.
Take a breath. One. Another breath. One.
None of them the same. No two one
Of anything completely distinct and identical
Anywhere in our known universe, and yet
We count them, all the same. It’s technology,
Our game. It works without us knowing how,
And we tot up all our wonders, observations,
And we render them as poetry, as devices,
As finely tooled machines. One is an analogy
To another one, to any such one. One works.
In our star charts, we’re still here, counting
The echoing years. One. Eleven. Thousands.
The world lets us measure it but, outside of
Our circle, notes no anniversaries of its own,
Despite its many oscillating parts.