Only the Stars

I don't look at stars anymore. As a boy I would sneak out into the night to hear the horses and barn mice chewing over their hurts and simple hopes. I could smell the waking dreams of dogs and cats. a nocturnal alchemy I considered to be an extension of my integral soul. I did not look upwards I looked inwards and saw where I was in that sensory cauldron, the broth of being. One clear and cold night, I looked up and knew that I was far away, far away from this farmed backwater, far from these backwoods, the barn, the flagstone kitchen, my mother, my father, myself. The stars, those blazing guardians of eternal silence, held me enthralled to a distance I could not imagine. I was only this tenuous stem of blood, left here to sway on the edge of an horizonless night, a vastness that held my breath and heartbeat in the limbo of its indifferent favor. That night, the stars spoke to me in the language of the dead. For a moment, the far away echoed close, while I, like a moth, felt pinned to the void. I heard the starlight sing and if that song had words it would have said: We harvest your dreams, set fire to them, use there ash and your ashes to come, for fuel. Only we exist among the doomed. Only the stars.