Constellations
On my back at the physical
therapist’s office I consider
why in the tiles overhead
the spray of holes
echoes a starfield photograph:
the scatter of them,
their mix of sizes — not
the geometric drill of old
lunchrooms, but designed
to absorb the manifold
frequencies that make noise
noise. She coaxes
my body to relax
against the brouhaha
of nerves dictating strict
configurations which the skeleton
accepts by deforming. We taxed ourselves
to give ourselves
a better Hubble:
Webb: the bureaucrat
who took to the moon
four guys, none of them me
for reasons not restricted
to my back. It’s less about
taxes than about being
absorbed. Her next-to-silent
Classical murmurs on. To find a star
that moves (planetum, comet, death
-dealing asteroid) we use a blink
comparator: two plates of the same
sky, a stereoscope, a button
for back and forth. The speck that jumps
is not of the Fixed Stars. The sky
maps well-studied stresses, and we
pick out the squeaky wheel. Did the moon
squeak? We who wished upon
going did — and in those same years marched
for budgets for the underclass;
our motto: never
zero-sum! Among muscles,
when one wins
and another loses,
so do all. All noise
canceled, we can’t tell
that we’re not deaf.