Sterile ellipse seen as vague clouds a blurry
dim
and childless but some million times the size of us
Along with nearby Triangulum’s flocculent
fluffy scruff having texture of spiral loosely
clumped with Andromeda spinning like St. Katie’s
endearing firework wheel of sparky dust, gas,
plus two hundred billion stars in lithe careening
brightened weave toward whispy seeming endless eve of
polychromic splay of unrelenting aeons’
gaze. These like we in Milky Way are surrounded
by fireflylike galactic dwarfs revolving trackless
like riderless horse to witness pure silent
immensities glow by, and seeing these giant
boring blobs of starry ellipseses who glide
by in blur like Pegasuses spurn the thorny
dark of rugged bleak of blackest darkest skies.
These misnomered monsters fifty billion lightyears
side to side reduce our own to midget size, as
chrysanthemum compares with dandelion or sun
alongside girth of earth pea-sized, yet unable
to birth stars again. Whereas our own Milky Way
within its most famous cloud of dust has three
illustrious starbearing strands
in shades of pink, hue of blue called renowned Pillars
Of Creation, framed in twinkling retinue. But
elliptical giants remain red and dead and
huge like unburied fossils ache silent against
bright glare of diggers’
days of afternoontime light.
Deep, deep into a distant past these wondrously
heavenly things are seen. Our Andromeda
neighbor is over two million light years past, and
glimpsing into cosmic dawn in a tiny square
was seen dozens of allsized ancient galaxies
in variance of hue from specks minute to
largish bend of swirls, like gorgeous marbles’ pail spilled
across a table. As star-forming nebulae,
these star-begetting nurseries once unseen by the
naked eye, entire factories producing stars
themselves galactic-sized hiding behind veils of
sulky, sultry dust. And beneath last century’s
submillimeter gauge of vision only three
dozen pixels of long wavelength seeing distant,
ancient galaxies until just now recently
invisibly birthing fresh stars by the thousands
per year. Cosmic dinosaurs, makers of dead red
ancestors, distant extreme efficient things living
in the dark of an early universe. Which, when
sped by simulation reveals like unto
network web of synapse spent, axon along
dendrites not unlike real kind unseen inside a mind.
