Rumination with Night Sky and Cotton
       

What you can't see may not matter. What you can barely see, those
dim stars and hints of nebulae, could mean no more than a tidal pool

drying out a week sooner or later, a menu with three entrees taped over,
the spindly trees balancing up and out of the old quarry's gravel.

How do you count the ways? How do you reckon arsenic and
adobe, Egyptian cotton and the fruit of the month arriving pithy

and soft in its cardboard cocoon, food even the pigs would scorn?
Our matches can be struck only on the box. Our colors are multiple,

pure, and inconsolable. Some stretches of highway are too crowded
and too lonesome for any vehicle made in this solar system.

Night after night all that music pours down from the stars
and disappears, night after night we roll the doors shut and fasten

both the locks, and the picnic table and the deck chairs hum
and quiver, quiver and hum, and the satellites shift and blink,

and the planes bent on Newark, Pittsburgh, Seoul roar through
somewhere in between, calculating everything, spinning hard,

burning what they must and scattering what's left behind them
like a trail of bread crumbs, or long-fiber cotton, or broken clouds.

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Copyright © 2014 Jeff Gundy All rights reserved
from Somewhere Near Defiance
Anhinga Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission