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The Origin of Order
by Pattiann Rogers

Stellar dust has settled.
It is green underwater now
in the leaves of the yellow
crowfoot. Its vacancies are
gathered together under pine
litter as emerging flower of the
pink arbutus. It has gained the
power to make itself again in
the bone-filled egg of osprey
and teal.

One could say
this toothpick grasshopper
is a cloud of decayed nebula
congealed and perching on his
female mating. The tortoise beetle,
leaving the stripped veins of
morning glory vines like
licked bones, is a straw-colored
swirl of clever gases.

At this moment there are dead
stars seeing themselves as marsh
and forest in the eyes of muskrat
and shrew, disintegrated suns
making songs all night long in the
throats of crawfish frogs, in the
rubbings and gratings of the
red-legged locust. There are spirits
of orbiting rock in the shells of
pointed winkles and apple snails,
ghosts of extinct comets caught
in the leap of darting hare
and bobcat, revolutions of rushing
stone contained in the sound
of these words.

The paths of the Pleiades and
Coma clusters have been compelled
to mathematics by the mind
contemplating the nature of itself
in the motions of stars. The patterns
of any starry summer night might
be identical to the summer heavens
circling inside the skull. I can feel
time speeding now in all directions
deeper and deeper into the
black oblivion of the electrons
directly behind my eyes.

Flesh of the sky, child of the sky,
the mind has been obligated from
the beginning to create
an ordered universe
as the only possible proof
of its own inheritance.

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