Planetarium (One Adult Admission)

An hour lets me duck out of my situation.

The planetarium: a den

from afternoon sunlight, this low sun of December,

my reaching shadows.

I still hoard a sense of restriction:

I can’t do what I want.

The dome is a model. Its hunter

desired a moon goddess. Why not let love

be that simple? In his mythic death

he burns his belt of stars.

The lenses shift, configuring the sky,

any time and place the technician decides,

the seasons advancing, their fast spin.

In this turning, here’s the view from Sydney.

Scorpius no longer trolling the horizon.

Night sky, when desire stays

only desire, there’s a privacy

I wish to renounce.

I wish to accept the risk:

once something happens, the stars there become fixed:

So a star never is

as it appears

when it appears

by the time its light arrives,

so the brightest

never satisfies.