The residue of stars

Running rest-day ...

... here's a David Harsent poem, taken from the pictured 1998 collection:


An Experiment

He must have been standing just there,
just there, like that,
two hundred years or more
unless I'd slipped
in through the door a couple of minutes
after the others had left;

in any case, he was alone
staring at something
everyone else had missed, his eye
so hot for the quest, you'd think it
the eye of a loon,
the rimless eye of a prophet,

taking a view of things that went all the way
to the other side of the room,
and that glimpse he'd recently had
of whatever it might have been:
America, Andromeda,
the back of his own head.

I could see the bird was stone dead.
'And what's this', he fanned the crisp
white crest with a fingertip,
'but the residue of stars, the final jot
from each of a million stars, an old star -
system emptied of its light? -

isn't that what we come down to,
in the end?' He gave a nod
at the specimen jar, the dark gizzard
in its formalin soup:
'But there's hazard in knowledge. This odd
fellow bled all ends up.'

Unlike the white bird. It lay
on his hand, unblemished
except, perhaps, for the awkward way
its beak clapped its tongue, and the one
broken feather, and the reddish
bloom in that far-seeing eye.