After...

I wish I had some stars to see; something to look into that never ends, the closest thing to infinity that gives a sense of forever.  I want to see forever, a Mobius strip of energy which absorbs time, shatters the hours and days into clusters of galaxies spiraling, wheeling, careening through airless space.

On a near winter night, the ice of starlight pierces the cold as coruscating diadems, but I know them; Orion, the Big Dipper, Cassiopeia.  They are fiery bastions of measured life, telling the seasons for as long as we humans have been, yet, they are limited as well; constellations are held by the same law that nothing ever stays the same.  Stars spread apart, new ones are born, others flicker into oblivion; even they disappear.  But space remains and will not fold into itself for a time beyond measurable thought; when it does happen, one final origami trick, shall it tumble, explode into a thousand paper cranes and become another once upon a time?

I want to look, to forget momentarily that I am mortal, pinned to the planet; my desire is to see the window of forever.  Let me be a part of infinity, of no hands spinning around an ivory dial, to where quaggas and dodos bray, where loved ones wait, where death explains itself in humbled murmurs.

Bed, let me find you and wrap myself deep under heavy covers; give me dreamhorses to gallop through starfields till sun up, let the striped, desert quagga be my courser.