Excerpt from "Nature Poem"

When a star dies, it becomes any number of things

like a black hole, or a documentary.

The early universe of our skin was remarkably smooth

now I stand in a rapidly dampening Christina Aguilera tee

The first stars were born of a gravity, my ancestors—

our sky is really the only thing same for me as it was for them,

which is a pretty stellar inheritance

I don’t know how they made sense of that swell, how they survived long enough to make me, and am sort of at war with sentimentality, generally

but that absence of an answer, yet suggestion of meaning

isn’t ultimately that different from a poem

So I’ve started reading the stars

Nothing is possible until it happens, like digesting sulfur instead of sunlight

or friends with benefits

Poems were my scripture and the poets, my gods

but even gods I mean especially gods are subject to the artifice

of humanity.

I look up at the poem, all of them up there in the hot sky and fall

into the water, a stone