Reflections of Stellar Ecology

Poem

At ten thousand feet we’d watch
     the satellites trace their quiet
geometries across a sky as black

as a bird’s eye. What was I, ten?
     eleven? More said some were UFOs.
We’d see them first as they

rose above aspens silhouetted
     darkly along the horizon on one side of
the beaver pond and watch

them disappear in pine shadow on
     the other. The pond was like a hole
of universe punched through the thin

plate of flat earth. In still waters you could
     see the milky-way burn from one
bank to the other. A fish would set

a ring of ripples spreading across
     the stars. Were those galaxies
gently rocked by the trout rising

to take a caddisfly laying eggs
     on the Pleiades?

Notes

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