‘White Out’

No satellites here. Even the old telegraph pole up the hill
is swathed in ivy, hops, waving bindweed,
footed by rhododendron gnawing into its wires.
At night we are pitch black, cut off from

the information highway. Dark matter has gravitational effects:
light, too, draws everything to it like these moths
and ginny spinners banging against my window.

From space, we’re a scattering of light across the cold
Northern Hemisphere—we see only stars, collisions
a thousand thousand years old, a history of accidents,

who did what to whom, and in what circumstances,
how best to father and mother an Olympic hurdler, or a king.
But I have no time for celebrities, feel only the enveloping dark,

briar rose petals scattered across disappearing hills,
one rook calling to another in the aspens.