Asteroid Morning
Maybe it came first as light.
Not fear, not knowledge, not the long
mathematics of ending,
but light spilling itself across the leaves,
across the backs of the herd,
across the teeth of the river
and the black stones still keeping
the night’s deep chill.
Maybe one lifted its head
from the fern-bent earth
and saw the eastern edge of everything
burn brighter than it should,
gold with a strange white center,
a beauty so excessive
it must have felt like a gift.
And what is a creature to think,
having only ever had morning
arrive as morning arrives,
except that this one has come dressed
for a ceremony.
The old ones would have stilled.
The young would have gone on nudging
and snapping at flies,
their bodies full of the ordinary.
A wing. A cry. Mud underfoot.
The ache of hunger.
The comfort of being many
beneath a warming sky.
How could they have known
the world was already choosing
the past tense for them.
How could they have called it anything
but beautiful,
that impossible bloom at the horizon,
that lavish wound of color,
that sudden church of brightness
opening where the sun should be.
I keep thinking of the brief delay
between seeing and understanding.
How mercy might live there.
How for one stunned moment
the terrible thing can still be only
a marvel,
one can still only
Look.
And maybe that is how it was:
the great bodies quiet in the grasslands,
the crests, the horns, the armored backs
all turned toward radiance,
each animal lit from the front
as if chosen for a painting,
as if the earth, before taking back
what it had made,
wanted to show them to themselves
once more in splendor.
So they watched.
They watched light consume the sky
hotter than sunlight had ever been.
They watched the edges of the world
turn holy with fire.
And if there was, in that final looking,
no word for ending,
there may have been something like praise —
not because they understood,
but because the morning
was unbearably, fatally,
beautiful.