The Stars

I seek the stars at dusk
Anticipate the tiny nocturnal things
As they emerge to forage on blackness
In silence the mind assigns them.

Consider it. Now,what make you then of this thesis
And its lies?

Each night new constructions
Devices of language ornaments of tongue:
The ruby orb of war
The azure face of Ishtar
Orion’s dazzling belt.

And tonight –
O how the dim spark mocks the incredulous eye!
O the task the eye apprehends!

For meaning must the eye assign to incomprehensible vastness
Or else the conjecture of the fingertip collapses
And then the fall of man.

This is the theory.
For the brain will not flinch in its assay:
It is as cool as a spy.

The logarithm of precedent is scrutinised
While within the meat the electric trickery
Like a Houdini moves its neural fingers
And voila! The values roll off the tongue quick as curses.

The habilines toward the summit of Kilimanjaro
Beheld beyond a world they understood in strides.

But when the dusk began to bulge and flicker
Into the sky in wonder they gazed
Til one among them issued new utterance.

It is this I would address:
Do not believe in the silence of the star
Until it is confronted.

Nor its benign and tiny bulk:
The star is the godhead of mass itself
And seethes with malignancy
And to it thine eye is but an atom
Quite close by.

The star’s silence is a broken premise.

And that’s how these things get started
And in whispered re-telling are become
Like the rosy-fingered dawn
That hasn’t a hand but a tongue.

So, we are here. The star is there. Between,
The void and the reflex of sentience to speak.

The eye abhors nihility.
The mind will not endure it.

The linguist and new memeist starts and stops her study here.
For who is speechless before the altar of the black expanse?
Even the crow will caw, the wolf howl.
A man will say a word or two.

I will say it:
The mind is the child of the universe
The daughter of the star
Conceived to know itself its kin
Through a dialogue of metaphor
Toiling ever slavishly
Under a whipping tongue.

© Rhett Talley