Someone please tell me how to get these damn spacings to work without putting a line in - it would be nice if I could denote stanza breaks... I really hate how they've changed everything here... grr argh! And why is everything double-spaced? Sigh...

“Space”

by Adrienne D'Agostino

---

Dark –

it is always dark in space,

an eternal night in a universe that never sleeps:

no daylight, no changing seasons,

nothing beyond the ebb and flow

of the solar winds,

each marking their paths like

celestial currents in a midnight ocean.

Radiation belts, magellanic clouds of dust,

the burning tails of comets,

the haughty grandeur of shooting stars,

(their exit a last hurrah for life before extinction) –

all lending to this shadowed place

a light of their own, and yet a light

that can only grasp tenuously onto being,

even as the penetrating darkness closes in.

The gravity of planetary bodies a

complex ballet, an adjustment of subtle forces,

their own permanency a mere veil

that hides the secrets of ever-changing space.

Vortices created and devoured

in the shadows of giants

that look on with the stoic gaze of kings.

The murmurs of dwarfs:

red, white, brown, black,

an empyreal display of evolution.

The Music of the Spheres –

O such a harmonious chorus,

where sound and light reign with tandem force

and all vestiges of earthly language flee

in favor of cold, alien equations.

Sporadic meteor showers trailing

away their spinning debris like children

dribbling at the table as they eat,

scattering their essence across time in the kind of

lazy manner adopted by those who know

they have seen all there is to see.

Another gap is created within this

empty

(living)

space;

the stars and planets adjusted their orbits

reluctantly, making way for this new visitor

(for we are all visitors, here, in the intangible),

Delicate powers accepting one more

corporeal introduction within their shifting dynamics.

A silent ghost shivers

across an ancient singularity.

---

Suns go nova in a sudden, violent explosion

of flame flung at blazing speeds,

leaving behind only memory and reflection;

stars gleam and glitter until lost to view

as planets form to fill the expanse.

A shower of meteorites,

burning icy-hot and scattered across space

like so many tiny snow-flakes,

dances in the path of a dying sun.

So many universes overlapping, one

great celestial Clock to marry their orbits

eternally in simple harmony.

The sea of consciousness pulses gently

As the rocking pull and tug of gravity laps

at elliptical paths with a sentient persistence.

A breath stirs the silence into a hushed song,

a siren leading the lost, the dispossessed,

and the dreamers deeper into the web

of another reality.

---

A pulse, a beat, and then a massive ripple

spreads its invisible fingers, reaching

to the farthest corners of the universe,

the very stars engulfed in its presence as it

moves like a predator among them

(a shadow among shadows, ever darker).

Unflagging, deliberate, it makes its way

from planet to planet, seeing

but not seeing

and always (never) knowing –

Time’s oracle.

So many silent voices fixated with

echoes of what once had been,

memories of what now is,

ambiguous certainties of what would come to be.

Driven like some impassive ghost

unimpeded by such common chains as reality,

its presence the quintessential incarnation of patience,

the emptiness around it gives way to its passing

as if to an implacable will.

Fear echoes in its wake; darkness quails before it

and even the melancholy of space holds its collective breath,

for that is its nature, space:

an unrelenting mistress and a quixotic guide.