I stand hip-deep in the early hours and stare into the night trying to separate
the stars from the satellites with only my bare eyes to freight my gaze forward
but I am so leaden and discontinuous down here where I am forced as flat
and horizontal as the tone produced by a six year old learning the trombone, until
you arrive beside me, a model of quiet concentration with your eye fitted
to this capable telescope, travelling at speed, drawing closer to the firmament.
It is easier now to gather a sense of curvature or at least some direct path
leading uninterrupted further into the blackness and you say the name of
a passing constellation like an incantation - lifting some demonic curse or
bestowing a blessing, perhaps the gift of super-human sight - then lapse into another
one of your attentive silences and beyond charms or even words. You are funicular now,
your velocity is its own engine and we will not be dislodged or spun out of sync, until
all these flat, distant points of clear light have become anthesis and we are
enveloped, paradoxically, golden and all at once we find we are all together alone
and each one of them is so, so much like us: brightly vertical.