Astral Bodies
People claim astral bodies like sports teams.
A volunteer manning a telescope shouts Andromeda!
Who wanted to see Andromeda!
A heavy shadow of a woman eagerly bustles
To the front of the line. Her shape leans and crouches
To level her eye with the lens. Inaudibly, she quietly
Coos at crowded conversations, overlapping,
stepping into one another – a star cluster light years
overhead. Her wonder is like mine –
my eye carefully unfocusing to see Jupiter.
The volunteer manning a telescope explains how
I won’t see the moons of Jupiter if I look straight on.
Find the fuzzy object. Let it move to the side
Of your vision – look avert, or you’ll miss it.
At his instruction I see three moons nearly out of my vision.
At his instruction, I’ve grown relaxed in the fuzziness of
All bodies. The children who riot over the meteors falling
With long blue trails of catastrophe. My family argue
About the cloudy sky – it’s just clouds, just clouds – ah!
It’s The Milky Way! Stubborn certainty turned to billions
Of distant dimensional objects. Ah! My aunt says, Ah!
A red coated volunteer sights his green laser on M13,
a star cluster held together by gravity, almost as old
as the universe. The volunteer sights the cluster in the eye
Of a telescope. I see tightly laid glitter that reminds me
of this blue Barbie dress of my childhood.
What would happen if it all came unglued?
If the invisible binding force fell away and each star became
Solo–
not proximal to the others that together become named objects?
Perhaps colliding into Hercules, unbinding the points of his story.
Days ago we sat in red chairs at a red metal table
Sipping coffee and you said, isn’t it funny it’s easiest to fall?
Chuckling at yourself, you said, well, that’s gravity!
You talked about the walls falling down. How the story falls
Away when the raw wood of stage framing becomes clear,
Ugly, and gaping. How – untrained, looking at the stars
they are bright burning objects without mythology.
Without gravity, there is no Hydra, Lyra, or Perseus.
Rioting children grow bored of the dark sky and tell
Their own stories –
mom and dad might be long lost relatives and so my mom
could be my long lost cousin or grandma
and my dad could be my cousin or my uncle!
Children keep tugging at rules of gravity–
tugging harder when the sound of adult voices steer
them toward civility. A shower of meteors suddenly spills
out of the black of the sky. A child leaps into the night,
one eye closed, to catch dying stars in his fists.
Althea Seloover, 2020