Terra Cognita Part 2

2.
Where the silent flame's parabola
sinks to rest on burnished dust,
we wear a golden mirror set
into a sphere of silvered white
wrapped around a skull and kept
so that the mirror hovering low
above the lunar surface might
reflect the Earth that rose against the night.

The blue-black globe breathes with sparks
of light at night, by day is slashed with white
over green and umber swathes which are,
upon closer circumspection, seen
as the familiar edges of our continents.
And so our land becomes landscape.
mapped, measured and made flesh,
forever frozen beyond touch.

The storm-swollen Red Spot of Jupiter
and the swollen iris of a dead man's eye
in the backwash shallows of Lake Victoria are
-- each seen from a proper distance --
the same cold circle shut
to any possible meaning
we may wish to assign to it; a metaphor
without resonance or consequence;
a frame of no fixed reference,
a grid on which we dance as if death
was something perpetually happening to others
on some sound emptied of actors,
and run by robots on the dark side of the moon.