V. H. King's Ink

they say space is full, a vast expanse
where night is the norm: but here
I am, gazing out at the blue, floating
along some fog of phone calls I’ve not made,
emails I haven’t sent, voicemails
I don’t want to listen to. my to-do list
mounts ever-higher while another useless
appointment wears down my will to finish
yet another disability verification form—
and ignoring all the things my brain
tells me I should be doing, I wonder:

what cold peace exists out
there, where the sun always
shines and stars go dark
one by one? what solace awaits
throughout this consciousness
of cresting gravity waves and condensed
blackness, sweetening the mystery
and brightening the horizon
of what we’ll never know?

how much am I part of this holy
expansion and contraction
of gas and light, of matter
and miasma, of an organism far older,
far larger, than is possible to comprehend?

the stars do not shift their
equilibrium; comets are pushed
and pulled, their singed tails
spiked with ice and metal.
suspended in all the frozen heat,
this minefield of expelled light
and swallowed worlds,
are colors we have no names for
and sounds we’ll never hear.

such unseen artistry—but we catch
snippets of a galactic symphony so sweet
even the sun gets cavities. on days when
I can do nothing but comfort myself
with the blue and the gold of the sky,
I think of those greater moving parts,
composed and choreographed by the same
quantum hand that pushes broken cups
to my lips and purges bitterness from my heart.