Under a sky of stars and no moon, in the curve of headlights
alarming the county,
a line of deputies wades through a field
of waist-high hay. By a wall of gray pine at the edge
of that field, something curls, glows
bright as blood.
I curl under my blanket,
watch the yellow dial on the radio, the stars hanging
in the black panes of the window. This is real,
not make-believe horror, metallic, alive,
ultimately alien,
and the deputies trailing paths in the hay
move toward it, inch by inch, as the voice of the reporter
rises bodiless in my room, wind in his microphone
like a siren whistling the end of the world
as we know it. And I remember, vaguely, a night
my father carried me into,
a sky of loud crickets, a field of stars, a radio tower,
and circling the red light of that tower, two unknown
lights,
balls of blue and green.
What those deputies find at the end of that field,
a piece of broken sign,
the letter O
in flourescent red, is nothing to ease my sleep.
I dream of the whole universe, of an infinite
and indiscriminate creation
where the black frontier behind the eyes floats back as far
as the light behind the stars.
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