for Neil deGrasse Tyson
I’ve composed another opera where the stars sing
and I accompany on original ivory, all the while
I’ve felt the rats’ hunger having finally eaten through
the floorboards. Somewhere newscasters choral
. . .we’ve lost another craft. . . and I imagine
your constellation slowly rolling overhead—ungodlike;
so very human. O’ we rely too much on pattern recognition
and strange attractions – this is my unnatural selection
played on the tusks of another dying species,
while the ape mind exalts the reptilian brain
and the trilobite eye. I think this was meant to be a love song,
yes, though I’ve forgotten how to rhyme.
If god had a voice, it too, is the background radiation
slowly going out in all directions of the universe, singing,
so many things to get right in a split second . . . Bang!
And perhaps this is really your song, sung under the grinding stars,
where you hover over an event horizon contemplating
our reflection in the stretched-out time of a black hole.