Fuck Everyone But Us

We are people who build galaxies and people who build stars. The astronomer describes himself. We write this down to catch it like he catches a moment of the universe on a chart with numbers instead of looking up. Some objects move too fast to stay together, even with their immense density. He says this and I can't help but think of people, swirling hives of strangers colliding and whizzing past each other. He talks of self-gravitation, the way the weight of something can hold itself together, and he means galaxies, but what else is white hot and aching under its own weight, held together by the glue of weighty destiny, defined by nothing else but our cells' proximity. Star clusters form behind clouds of molecular dust, which they shed to finally be seen. He calls them ungrateful children, because what binds them is the gravity of the cloud they drive away, and when the cloud is gone they too disperse, forgetting families and homes. Some stars form so fast that we can barely catch them, hovering just over a few million years in adolescence before unsticking themselves from the sky. Some are the slow protracted growth of others' cast offs, recycled from what they have shed in their own growing pains, scraps swept into a waiting cosmic dustpan — all this takes place behind the curtains of molecular dust, in a darkness behind which stars bigger than our sun are waiting for their cue to cross the sky, while we look up. They are ejecting heavy elements and pushing apart the sky. We say we can't see a thing. There are too many headlights down the highway. We are the least known and understood of what we see, because we cannot get outside ourselves to study how a galaxy spirals out into the universe and, if no one is around to watch it, is as beautiful and as loud as we suspect. All our mirrors and all the optics in the world cannot give us the image we want, the thing as such, the image that is not an image at all, cannot give us ourselves, invisible. We have astronomy in our letters. Plotable curves come apart in our fingers, like water spilled on sheets, like sentences diagrammed and dismantled.