When Venetia Burney first whispered that name
into her grandfather’s ear, you ceased to be
a faint albedo on photographic plates
on the furthest shoulder of our galaxy.
You were thenceforth Star of the King of the Dead,
Lord of Tartarus and its portentous rivers,
the ninth planet—destined to be neglected
by Gustav Holst and silver-winged voyagers.
More cryptic than Ganymede or Callisto,
you beguiled us with your scale and your distance,
master of the Eighth House and of Scorpio
(till The Epsom Comet cleared Venetia’s fence
and left your name swirling in her morning tea,
dissolved by earthly gavel and committee).

They drank like gods—by which I mean they fell.
My lord would chart the stars with drunken proof,
then chart again the table’s edge, the bench, the wall,
declare them wrong, and call the stumble truth.
He swore the sky was his, or so he fought,
measuring heavens cup by cup, until sundown,
till even Saturn reeled. Young Kepler watched—
smiled thin as ink—and wrote the good parts down.
Good Lynx, you rose with all a noble air—
antlers in the candlelight, your crown awry.
You lapped the cup, turned and climbed the stairs,
then fell like Icarus, much too drunk to fly.
All the while, two fools disputing stars—
your constellation burns beyond their charts.

I. Solitary Refinement

At the hour of second sight, he scrawls
two marks—one holy, one erratic—
an incantation on his office wall,
like the sympathetic magic
of his primordial kin—whose curves
of ochre bison, hunters, horses,
the French so lovingly preserved.
He’ll be half-blind like them, forced
to squint while scribbling in the faintest light
where shadows move like feral beasts—
he’ll press his fingers to his eyes
to prove he actually exists, to cleave
the borders of his prison cell
in every hollow of his skull.

II. Horror Vacui

The noble savage is a mythic lark,
yet proves no less compelling.
How then does man outwit the dark
without putting out his eyes, or sailing
heedlessly toward the burning sun?
Must he lash himself—and his brother—
to a rattling chariot, and run
to death beside him for their mother’s
madness? His choices are more limited
than tracing filament through a maze.
Perhaps the ‘enlightened’ primitive
will cry into that boundless cave,
only to hear voices beyond the room,
echoing deeper into the vacuum.

III. The Persistence of Division

But then the office space grows dim,
the only light, his thoughts—refracted through
his bourbon, ice, and the tumbler’s rim—
a film unspooling out of view:
his final moments drawing near;
a flicker caught between this world and that;
a blurred frame for each passing year—
now ending on this faded photograph:
He’d always thought his wife had smiled
a bit obliquely for a bourgeois girl,
sunning on that imperial virgin isle
by a native decked in costume pearls
strung from his belly to his nose.
He gave her horns—the native, a halo.

Gushing Spring

I begin where the body meets the floor,
the sole unseals its mouth against the skin.
This ache admits the point where healing pours,
the way dry ground admits the rain within.

Great Surge

Between the bones, I work the knot to light,
and feel it climb, reduced to simple need.
What holds in muscle moves itself at night,
a pressure worked through fiber into heat.

Three Mile Point

Below the knee, the muscle learns the number:
one bowl of rice, then work until compelled.
The body holds the rise of hunger,
how far the fields extend when breathing fails.

Joining Valley

The hand goes slack. The trade is learned by feel:
to hold, release—remain upright and still.

Inner Gate

At the wrist, the passage seals the chest.
The heart kicks hard against a closing wall.
Air comes too late, the mouth compressed.
I do not move. That stillness is the rule.

Great Sun

The temple bears descending fire
a brightness set in force, a binding law.
What heat selects, it lifts onto the pyre;
what heat rejects is left exposed and raw.

Hall of Impression

Between the brows, the pressure slips—I grasp
not faces, but the burn that faces leave:
a sky that falls, a field erased to ash,
the look that means the future has been seized.

Bright Eyes

Beside the eye, the signal tempers sight.
The nerve is charged, obedient to light.

Of gamelans and pictograms I sing,
of satellites with gossamer fins
arrayed with Apollo’s flaxen rings!
With ancient hearts and minds, contained herein:
may you accept this interstellar ark
which cut the vacuum with its ivory nose
and bore its noble calyx to the dark,
a billion nights of spinning in repose
until it fell upon your alien shore.
Of the Brandenburg and glorious Fifth
I sing, Queen of the Night and Morning Star!
Like dew, you must shake the stardust from our lips—
O Melancholy Blues, O Devil Bird!
We’re resurrected with each passing word.

The rough beast does not slouch, he walks erect
while speaking at rotary club luncheons,
charity balls, and a late-night public
access channel, building his dominion.
He is pudgy, hardly a feral child
brimming with preternatural powers
(an unassuming grass-roots antichrist),
yet he has been cultivating his charm
since the advent of sin. The world won’t end
with a whimper, but with a mobile phone
ringing out the Requiem Aeternam
beneath the seat of an El Camino:
then at rest stop near Idaho Falls
he’ll catch the endgame from a bathroom stall.

Nothing registered as wrong or right.
The room kept customs: cup and spoon,
a table scarred where mornings set their weight.
She knew at once. I looked away—too soon.
No gauge for harm, no light to score the dark,
no server queued to audit what was done.
The moment sealed itself, a postal mark
pressed into fact and sent into the sun.
From nothing came the laws I learned to keep:
first matter, then the habit of the nerve—
this heat, her lipstick on the coffee cup,
a stain the morning carried, then observed.
The clock advanced. My pulse obliged its turn.
I called it cause, not choice—and let it burn.