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   k e e p    w a t c h i n g    t h e    s k i e s

--- B .  D I E T R I C H


Over four billion years of Grace, and then what? In the heart of the Yucatan, its deep crater, down below the boundary between thunder lizard and thunder god, between the laying down

of one discarded mantle and another, there is that which we will never recover, that which set our planet reeling like a bell. In the year sixty-six, Josephus described a sword hung over Jerusalem.

June twenty-fifth, Twelfth Century, five monks watch the moon's upper horn split in two, spout flame. And Montezuma, and Giotto... The end of empires, the beginnings of kingdoms, heavenly ones, on Earth.

Harbingers. Heartbreak. A Siberian fireball. Dead trees, dead dinosaurs, dead, Tunguskan air. From Chicxulub to Arizona, from a walled, crater-carved city in Europe - its church heat flashed diamond -

back to the cold accumulation of Oort itself, the sky is always falling. Somewhere. Great, black, gap-toothed chunks of celestial snow, doom's detritus cast down like Thrones from the walls of heaven, or... No.

The heart aches for so much more than just some rock, haphazard, rent from the unremarkable orbit it has always known. But stones, simple stones are inevitable. Collision. Oblivion. The heart's conceit.

© crossconnect 1995-2002 |
published in association with the |
university of pennsylvania's kelly writers house |