Between the lines of terse newspaper accounts,
I hear these oceans so many light-years away,
see trees I wouldn't recognize as trees,
strain to glimpse across the gulfs
an animal moving through strange underbrush,
houses, music, those who sing whatever songs.

I can wring such marvels from dry astronomical reports,
stellar rotational blips, gas giants at seventy light-years --
it's easy! I'm human, a storytelling animal,
can sense beyond astronomers' careful numbers
fiction slowly giving way to fact.

Spirit, beat me numb with the great emptiness
and still I'll dream,
still the ghost-quasar of possibility
will electrify the star-fields
in my little head!