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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.

When I find you, darling, in the night
curled on the rug in the living room,
insomniacal as the TV—
though the dog’s happy, the coffee cake’s happy,

the chamomile tea’s happy—
and you’re crying, and I ask what happened,
and you answer, “roadkill,”
for a moment I’m sure you mean that’s

what we are in the universe, because
that’s how each day makes us feel.
A clump of hair in a drain, pickings,
as the moon makes of the furniture an X-ray.

With my hand like a little paw,
I hesitate, then touch your shoulder.