i sit up at night just to be alone,

during the day there is no escaping humanity.

i search for a bench in the park

away from people, there is no such bench.

marketa is asleep, i am tired,

soon i'll be sleep beside my sweet one.

for now, i'm thinking about something

i read today, that the milky way,

our cozy little home in the cosmos,

is some two million light-years across.

two million. think of it. a light-year,

i had to look it up, is six trillion miles.

two million times six trillion. my goodness,

that a lot of miles. i was staring into the blue,

paused in my search for a bench,

to look up and think about those numbers.

i could come up with no sensible way

to get a sense of it, and thought—

that degree of vastness is inhuman, 

humans need a scale by which

to measure themselves, ourselves,

not something so outlandish as the cosmos.

i thought of god reaching out to touch man,

to kindle life, to take a rib, it seemed less outlandish.

i thought of satan, of the archangels, of the descent,

of virgil and the styx, those i could imagine,

not the vastness, which i have to take on faith

no less than the other, the creation story—

i would invent such a story if were ur-man, ur-woman,

i couldn't sleep at night otherwise, 

thinking about the blue sky and beyond.

i would make it up, and make it my last thought of day.