Astronomy is About Substance

This poem is one of two originally published in “Tendon Magazine,” a publication of Johns Hopkins Center for Humanities and Social Medicine.
Read both poems here.

Astronomy is About Substance

Around the middle star of Orion’s sword
A streak of naked-eye stars hinge
The entryway to Heaven, a luminous hole
Through which human souls depart.
Pale gray oxygen lifts ascending dead
Pulling each one, finger first, toward milky ways
Angels scrunch their wings to fit through this gulf
Butterflies emerging from earth, this blackened chrysalis
Fluorescent silver drifts into once rural darkness. The Yogis say
You can stare into the corner of a room and with practiced intention
Your consciousness will be sucked far enough into the abutted planes of
drywall
You will be sucked right up into the hot blue stars. They do not
Say if this is a one way journey.
Orion’s sword hangs fixed
Pierces infinity of the southern sky, ultra-violent against
intruders and angels falling, accidental tourists and those seeking
asylum
against the back-lit night.

Photograph of Solar Eclipse Courtesy of NASA