De Caelis

by Temple Cone

Sequences & ratios mark the sky:
(mar?)
A shriek of starlings or star of shrikes ravels
In wondrous Celtic knots, endless as π,
Wind-drawn contrails whisper how our travels

Cross & fade in non-Euclidean lines,
Thunderheads cascade, & auroras, slick-
Hued with witch oils, roil toward horizons:
Page after page of heaven's arithmetic.

What's their function? A world of add & subtract?
Yearling geese fill gaps in autumn Vs,
Virga fades, hail kills crops—a hard fact.
Might God in fact reside in multiples—
Pollen or snow—or in dividing plague & wars,
(reminder?)
Our remainder the space between stars?

1
May, 2009

Temple Cone is an assistant professor of English at the U.S. Naval Academy. He is the author of five chapbooks of poetry—Eurydice & Orpheus (Finishing Line, 2009), Radiolaria (Pudding House, 2007), Quandary Farm (Pudding House, 2007), A Father’s Story (Pudding House, 2007), and Considerations of Earth and Sky (Parallel Press, 2005)—and of two reference works on 20th-Century American poetry and on Walt Whitman. He has received a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Poetry and the John Lehman Award in Poetry from Wisconsin Academy Review, and was a finalist for the Tor House Prize in Poetry and an Open Contest Winner in Best New Poets 2005.

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