The Astronaut
Belief requires lack of proof:
I think there will be stars because
they’re gone. Now you.
Now that you’ve gone
to prove again what absence takes
(the planetary heart, the stars)
I know belief as true. Thank you.
Blank verse. That’s what the sky
is made of: stars unrhymed,
imagined lines, disordered,
from satellite to moonshot,
wrought down here, by hand.
A line that stops—from me to you.
I know the stars, or one:
I know just how to spin within a hole
until the sun comes up.
Belief the planet turns requires proof:
absence, sense, a place
I’ll never see, payloads
rocketed into the sky.
Belief will end. Stop. Stop.
It ends—if you are gone.