Stargazing in December
Orion topples sidelong over my neighbor's roof. The cold envelops me in its dream of total absorption. Cell by cell I resist the stars and their crude superstitions, though centuries of astrologers pant like bread in the oven.
My sign is Capricorn, the goat. So it is the sign of Richard Nixon and Joan Baez. Duplicitous landscapes fester in the dark. Frozen ponds nurse their soft spots where children will tumble through the ice and drown. Mountains hardly two thousand feet high absorb so much dark that under their batting of snow they nurture fossils back to life in dreams so grotesque they discourage me from sleep.
Even now, I don't want to enter the house where my wife fries chicken and our cats rave for snacks and piles of scholarly books wait for my indulgence. I'd rather stand here in the cold and let the stars work their will, feeble as candles at funeral.
I'd rather feel the universe continue to expand, fleeing me the way facts flee a theory, while the atomic fire of creation cools in my ignorant glance.
* William Doreski says “My stuff has appeared in a bunch of magazines and several shabby books, most recently Another Ice Age (AA Publishers, 2007).”
