Orion Caught in a Dead Spruce

Every constellation is a found poem, exegesis lifted

from the sprawl to teach what seems true 

if your point of view is attenuated enough. 

The fractured boughs of this spruce are moon-limned

and the huntsman glows brazenly through 

like a fistful of fireflies or an imprisoned dissident 

before his firing squad.

If suns too distant to know one another may be flattened 

to vaguely human dimension then assigned 

some grandiose theme, 

why not permit other bodies into the morality play? 

For tonight, let this ruined wood at the canyon’s lip 

speak in chorus with the stars it holds. 

For tonight, from the iron trap of your perspective, 

let it add its pallid epigraph to the man-shaped myth.