Dust

“…the tendency of interstellar dust to more strongly scatter blue starlight…”—a NASA report

…is love entering the picture as though it belongs,

its sparklers, its booming fireworks blooming out of the dark,

a name to repeat on the phone-side doodle pad,

a charm, a quark, an irreducible absolute.

Its scientists hold a magnifier,

probing for something smaller.

…it’s a bomb in a war in the gut of a man and a cry

that wakes a dream, a broken silence, a silencer.

A call to arms and a call to put them down.

A ray of hopelessness flailing like prairie grass

in Nebraska wind. It follows a foregone conclusion

like the blown fluff of milkweed shimmering in sun.

…it’s something about the formation of stars

in the emptiness between the emptiness.

How galaxies collide, suns die,

how You are the Milky Way, the scattered blue

nebulae, the solar wind, the silence

within the Silence, here, right here,

in this spinning blue world.

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