The center of this collection is a series
of meditations on Hubble Telescope images
where I approach them from an ekphrastic point of view,
that's when a poet uses a detailed description, according
to the Norton Anthology of Poetry,
to examine a visual work.
There they mean artwork for the most part,
but the work that Hubble has done for us over the last 20
plus years, has given us a glimpse of the heavens
that no one had ever imagined.
This next poem is based on the Horsehead Nebula.
Number two, The Horsehead Nebula.
"A horse is a thing of such beauty none will
tire of looking at him so long as he displays himself
in all his splendor.
The Greek historian, Xenophon, imprinted
like a glyph in our minds a pattern born in trance.
The dream of momentum rendered against the sensory void
of darkness.
Pulled into the Earth and cold caves of Lascaux and Chauvet
where shamans ordered their animal
visions against stone walls.
Imagine that erratum of prehistory, a carved ivory
tusk worn smooth with worry, the Voglehead horse
held close as the tribal spears stalk a herd of dun ponies
to spook stampede toward the hungry luck of gravity
and cliff.
Imagine the first dim soul sensing
the absence of a horse's back, begging for his form.
The scamper astride an unwitting beast.
The terror and shock.
A ruined stalk.
Frenzy breaks full gallop across the steppes.
That moment, horse and rider, tangle of hair and hide,
thigh and quarter clench seismic-blurred landscape,
thunder and dust, eccrine perfume, lather, and panic--
in that exchange two species intertwine irrecoverably,
a new knot in the strings of theory.
And rider's thrown a day's walk away into a new lack he cannot
fill.
In the old story, the King's son turns the white-starred head
of an unbroken beast toward the sun, soothes him with whispers,
elides his shadow.
This familiar silhouette, this dearest coincidence,
so distilled through mirrors and software that these strange
physics cannot help their own resemblance.
Astral red fire, the backdrop of cosmos,
each star a neuron firing 'horse.'
Queen's gambit, black steed, Bucephalus
bound toward eternity."