The Sentinals

I.
With woven steel hands
Cupped around clear cadenced tones,
Our servants of the infinite
Herald the skein of the sky,
Repeating one announcement,
Sans ornament and instantaneous,
To be etched on eternity's orbit
In a tattoo of silences.
Like torches tossed down
Into unexplored caverns
They dwindle and fade
Till the darkness dissolves them.
"We have arrived at the limits of Earth.
We stand on the edge of Forever.
We are here. We are here.
Are we alone?" In numbers and bits
These messages rise up,
Clambering the ladder out of the pit
Of ignorance and gravity
To float like amber dreams
Along the spine of light.

II.
The disconcerting occurrence
Encountered at the terminus
Of all the mind's parabolas
Is that nothing occurs at all.
Pinwheels of luminous plasma,
Glowing reefs of matter,
Spatter the crests of the darkness
And descend like lamenting specters
Caught in the eddies of shoreless seas.
Their lights, creeping up along
The curve of the continuum, gleam
No more than the two-franc candles
Cupped in crippled, translucent palms
In the grotto of Our Lady at Lourdes.
And thus they too only serve
To dapple, quite briefly, the dark edge
Of that shoreless ocean that consumes
What little light they lend,
And, like some pitch-drenched Pharaoh,
Are damned down to oblivion
By their own command to wait
Sealed in stone for a distant dawn.
All these thoughts and messages
Noted for a nanosecond, memorized
In some splinter of a second,
In tombs of luminous instruments,
Relayed, incorporated, and sent on:
A telegram with no fixed address
Woven out of frozen starlight,
And then to the darkness delivered.

III.
Fantasied fears spun in the circles of flickering campfires.
Mythologies winnowed out of unusual stones, or bone, or bits of bark.
Cosmologies concocted from rats' skulls, corn, and Titanium atoms.
Theologies tortured from the blind, wrung from hints in high cumulus.
All the perceived and imagined stockades raised against Zero:
The face of hoarfrost that blooms in the mirror, the last god,
He who is, the Pure Noun for which there is no adjective,
An orb of vacuum which sees itself as Cosmos, a tendril of unseen smoke,
A word which can never be spoken, the footprints of extinguished stars,
The visage mathematics cannot freeze.

IV.
Our handsome proportions and crafted ornaments evaporate.
All our most comforting music and meters dissolve.
The clapping of frostbitten hands in Antarctic tents continues.
Above us the rictus of universal harmonies lingers.
The new landscape appears: desolate, arid, airless, uninhabitable.
The tendrils of the desert of the senses invade its frontiers,
Guided by hands of ice that caress the belly of the stratosphere,
As far above the chill ionic winds erase the footprints pressed
Into the dust of the moon's untenanted tranquillity.

V.
The waterless waves on that sea without ships
Go outward, roll onward in search of horizons.
The faces in stone keep their futile appointments
With wind and with water, which also have schedules,
That return them to silence in a melding of stars
Here where the tree's roots grope into the air,
Here on the banks of tomorrow as the mind's searching message,
Laden with numbers, with dates, and with data,
Rises up and flies out past the sun to the birth of the stars.