Space Travel
From a plane window high over the brown Midwest
at flight speed we seem to be drifting,
the land slowly creeping under our wings
From a beachhead we watch waves come at us,
not to us, making their own time
As we watch, our time fades into theirs
suddenly or slowly or neither
when it has happened it has always been so
A raspberry thicket works its patch of earth
pushing tart berries at us day by summer day
we can think of as offerings but that is our time
on its time they are a moment of a rolling cycle
of birth and death, each moment of which
is the whole cycle
A wordless time not quite indifferent
to whether we pick and eat their berries
or birds do, or no one does
and they fall into the patch of earth they work
Between them and us, our time and theirs
is mutual travel; them at us, us at them
across what neither knows or can know
Space travel. Drifting over a shimmering expanse
of delay, of anticipation, of foreshadowing,
of arriving having never left
no thing wasted, no thing gained
seen now as a vastness that keeps changing
to smallness and back again
at many speeds, at once
The Dog Star 
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