This evening, in rural Pennsylvania,
a crowd forms near the storage lockers
abandoned by the nameless, dead maybe,
in prison or dementia, missing the rent
for so long nobody sympathizes
when the auction begins, a few dozen bids
thinning the signals until the price stalls
at fifteen hundred dollars, a better gamble 
than a few months of lottery tickets.

The moon, lately, was a celebrity, full
and a few miles closer than usual, enough
to bring three neighbors outside near midnight.
One of them suggested Auld Lang Syne,
but I was alone with remembering
the approach of planet Melancholia, 
how, for one perfect night, it was sized 
exactly like the moon, the sky brilliant
with the fascination of malevolence.

A perigree moon, science calls it, tides
heaving higher, but those three neighbors 
soon talked about televised storage wars, 
excited by the unknown. One repeated
the story of how eleven hundred dollars 
earned a vintage Corvette, and because
he had never been inside my house, I thought
of him bidding if it were foreclosed, how much
he’d risk for what he imagined I treasured.

Each spring our village sends trucks to collect
the objects we see as trash—a typewriter,
a VCR, a lawnmower, two rusted grills—
each of those hieroglyphic possessions
spelling what we will not store. Soon, the moon 
ordinary, a fleet of cars and trucks will invade 
our street, the scrupulous or poor permitted 
to thin our garbage, value in so many ruins
that nearly all of the useless vanishes. 

Lately and often, invasion drives the news.
When aid is tentative and tiny and slow,
the defenseless make weapons from trash.
This semester, a colleague has died 
during class, the first day, when his students,
all freshmen, knew him only by name or 
stories shared by veterans. One witness 
said she could see silence, like a cloud, 
smothering his body. The others nodded.

My father, who surrounded himself 
with silence, taught the imagery of stars.
On clear nights, when I visited, he turned
talkative in the back yard, picking out
even the lesser-known constellations—
bird of paradise, eagle, whale, the two
hunting dogs that I accepted as his way
to enter paragraphs that introduced
stories set, as he aged, further in the past. 

Surely, whatever faith he had would have 
welcomed the news, this evening, that 
cave paintings discovered in Europe 
depict, not animals, but constellations. 
That, from prehistory, there have been 
metaphorical portraits of the distant,
the ceiling of the world decorated 
by gods so generous they displayed 
an encyclopedia of their dreams,
every pin prick of light with a purpose 
waiting to be discovered by those
who risked the sharp-toothed and clawed.

The future was as unformed as heaven, 
a wish in need of language. Idea, 
not yet named, was about to be born,
its shape evoked in unreliable light.
A chant, at last, rose from the others 
in a smoke-choked cave, a syllable
repeated with the hum of approval.
Though such comfort proved elusive, 
the land violent and cruel, so little 
to be done about suffering despite 
spears and clubs readied nearby, 
whatever else might be said lost 
in eviction or death, that gallery
given over, as it often is, to brutes.