Star Watch

As if my finger were a piece of chalk And all the sky a schoolboy slate, I link The stars across the moonless night, and think I am Paul Klee taking a line for a walk. And so, connecting dot to sparkling dot (As in a puzzle in a drawing book), I see appear the bird, the fish, the bear, The ram, the man, the lion and the chair. O what a circus there in upper air! A million million years of light away What animals, what acrobats, what clowns! At dawn my moving finger stops its play (Like Omar Khayyam, having writ; like Klee). The circus gathers up its gear and goes To pitch its tent -- this hour -- on other towns. My eyes return from galaxies to grass. My feet are firmly set in garden loam. Like Voltaire's voyager I've come back home.