Some say that it is possible to dry a spirit from the cold
if you bring it by a flame, urging here, with a warm mug
urging hold and stay awhile, but child, I don’t know.

When it comes to what it’s really like, we are left
bereft with feeble words, and there are limits, too,
when it comes; to what any one of these may hold,

what any constellation untold may know, at any time, no
matter how vast the reach of your intention, the spirit
in space grows cold until it coalesces restless among

others with enough mass and time to collapse into
matter hot enough to burn the birth of the last new
star, the one that looks like nothing now, and will

look like nothing tomorrow, and tomorrow, and
for years of maybe somedays because the light of a new
star far away has a long way to fly to reach these eyes

and I know no better fuel for fire than this growing
cold, the way it stills what wanders until the others
come, how it stills a stranger’s tired feet until the time

to meet a new moment. Time spills the opening notes
of the first song of a new world only after the chorus
assembles and the first witness has waited to bear it.

– Stacey Johnson