Initiation
For love of incandescent nights,
apprenticed
to grok the splurge of cosmic dynamos—
the scholars charged
him with a task, to tally
stellar spectra crowding photographic
plates
matched against templates and catalogues,
data to ledger to
punchcards, boxed and stacked
for weekly dispatch to the mainframe’s
craw.
In time the numbers jumbled, spectral lines converged
and when
his masters left the room, he folded fleets
of paper gliders, set them loose,
to buck the sheer
of building-corner drafts, loop across the quad,
slice
through summer haze, and plunge at last
into an agricosm of expanding
green
skewed in yellowshift of dandelion stars.
--Tony
Hoffman
(c)2001
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tonyhoffman@earthlink.net