A Swan Like A Great Wheel Is Turning Poem by Bernard Henrie

A local obervatory reports a passing
cloud bobbing in space as a rowed scull
skips and jerks on the Charles River
in the Seven Sisters Regatta;

the airless vault overhead is X times
larger than moons we count from earth.

We ping, but no signal comes back,
Buffalo Bill Cody is silent, a mounted
Arapaho horseman is tight-lipped,
no time signature for satin gowned
Wilhelmenia Wiggins Fernandez.

This overhead panhandle of gas
shuffles away with an atavistic loneliness,
a solitude for which there is no language.

Watching with binoculars like a birdman,
I am a stranger in the neurasthenic dawn
poised beside a book of arithmetic.