Some nights

between the car and door

in the dark

I direct the eye up to find

the great river

of the Milky Way,

and stand for minutes

growing cold

in the autumn air,

unable to move

take my organ of visions away,

only to look back,

wishing the house

would vanish,

and I was alone,

far from lights and roads,

with its dark, its cold

its change

from everything known,

which makes even

those reaching claw-like

backyard trees

seem welcoming,

and I think this must be

how innocents are drawn

into madness,

a whispering begins,

that could be anything, the wind,

but then move rounds definite,

becomes a voice that has

but individual intended listener.

In a field years ago

I watched another river, dark,

without a name or extreme point flow overhead,

hundreds of thousands of birds,

the full opposite, the negative

of that silent, lifeless stream of stars.

The cornfield is gone thus are the birds,

though their descendants may

still tread in the steps of that same flyway,

perhaps a certain quantity of stars are also dead,

and single their light survives

like a memory a million years old

Tired and devoid of warmth [i]or[/i] heat under

icy reminders of by what means insignificant,

how brief we are, I mouth

their message in words I see

disintegrate: I am alone;

I am almost nothing.

Yet these rivers qualified in me.

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