Starlight

Starlight through the curve of space

Falls an age and does not tire;

Falls and knows not where it falls,

A curve of undiminished fire.

No interstellar cold may stay

These atoms in their arc of flight,

Their radiant geometry-

The mathematics of the night.

They see far off the burning suns,

The furious wash of tides that shake

The whirling nebulae, that twist

A moon's orbit till it break.

And, while it plunges, there is born

The eye wherein, as in a well,

This light will dive and cleave its way

To the dark brain where it must dwell,

And beat against its ivory walls-

A fragment of a universe,

A shining prisoner whose name

The jailer cannot even rehearse.

This is a stranger house than ever

A thousand million years away

Opened to release the light

That ends incarcerate in clay.

Here in matrix bedded lie

Quintessential suns; the bold

Enormous mountains; snows and seas

Housed in a skull a hand may hold.

As fruit sleeps in the seed they sleep,

Till memory, like a wind of spring,

Breathe but a moment; then they burst

Their husk of bone and rise and sing,

And bloom, each in the needful place,

Till, the wind over, they are led

Back.to the granaries whence they came,

Hid in the storehouse of the head.

There in their sleep they dream and build

For man such towers as look upor

The wheel of heaven turning from

Oblivion to oblivion.