← v21n2, Fall 2022
Poetry · Volume 21, Number 2

Through interstellar fields, through the revolving galaxies

—If you could have, would you have

Asked for more thunder or asked for more

Time, your eyes open in a broad flat field, you

A fleet messenger, astonished by the finite,

Holding the infinite in the palm of your hand?

—“That is so,” didn’t you say it, the Via

Lactea spiraling out of anyone’s

Control, you a planet wanderer, and did you

Not see the occultation of Aldebaran, or Giordano

Bruno hung upside down, naked, then burned alive?

—That day, February 17, 1600, at the Campo

De’ Fiori, the universe was proclaimed limitless,

The ashes of Ash Wednesday, what was left of

Bruno’s body thrown into the Tiber, free-falling,

Sunspots erupting, inertia divided by velocity minus gravity.