The Boy with the Telescope.

Leckie, Ross

The Boy with the Telescope

   He imagines the cosmic beginning,
   almost, light bending across the crackling
   cellophane of spacetime, pure history of itself.
   Night brings everything close, the stars'
   accordion music, the fragrance of the cedar trees,
   the click of a lighter, its small ignition.
   A teenager, he swings idly in the playground,
   wishing on the north star, wanting a boreal clarity.
   Once he stood in splinters of cold
   with a pair of binoculars, examining a comet,
   its tail a welder's arc, crystals of ice its acetylene
   to meld the molten copper of the stars
   to the night's dark iron. Astonished.
   That one look that transforms you into stone.
   He marks his many observations in a coil-bound
   high school science notebook.
   The boy imagines the sky deep as a rain barrel
   and he holds a ladle to his lips, drinks the black water
   with the slight brackish taste of spruce needles.