Your Sky

The sky unfolds above us, an atlas.
Diagram of paths open for travel.

Two tattered books by your side -
The Astrological Companion
and Burnham's Celestial Handbook.

I'm just an amateur astronomer sky watching.
I know the North Star is brightest,
(which you've told me is a fallacy),
and everything revolves around Polaris.

We name them with fingers and whispers,
placing index on white light,
declare them stars, or more specifically,
Metallah, Chara, Alya.

The brightest ones Capella, Vega, Altair.
All defined by magnitude, spectra class,
declination and proper motion.
Each with catalog numbers, coordinates.

Such familiar shapes - the W of Cassiopeia,
the square of Pegasus, the sickle of Leo,
the buckle of Orion's belt.

In the labeling of things,
the meaning gets lost.

Constellations, after all, are the invention of humans,
the desire to impress our own order to the chaos that is the sky.

What interests me is not the known,
but the unknown.  Those unnamed stars
that are invisible until looking through thick telescope glass.
The ones that hide between the obvious -
the Big Dipper, the Milky Way.

The ones that dissolve like static,
fold into the black sky without a trace,
and no one knows they are missing.

Obsolete, disused.
Patterns disconnected.

We are like those stars.
Mysterious, hidden on this pier,
the lake below us dark as the sky.
Seems we've been here a thousand years.
No one knows we are here.

The light from the nearest star
will take years to reach us.

I focus on the moons of your fingernails,
constellations of your palms.
Found on old maps, no longer recognized.