JULIE FUNDERBURK
Planetarium (One Adult Admission)
An hour lets me duck out of my situation.
The planetarium: a den
from afternoon sunlight, this low sun of December,
my reaching shadows.
When the night sky was my wishing place
and my back contoured the ground,
I pulled at the grass
mindlessly, wanting—
I still hoard a sense of restriction:
I can’t do what I want.
The dome is a model. Its hunter
desired a moon goddess. Why not let love
be that simple? In his mythic death
he burns his belt of stars.
The lenses shift, configuring the sky,
any time and place the technician decides,
the seasons advancing, their fast spin.
In this turning, here’s the view from Sydney.
Scorpius no longer trolling the horizon.
Night sky, when desire stays
only desire, there’s a privacy
I wish to renounce.
I wish to accept the risk:
once something happens, the stars there become fixed:
the Christ star
as seen by wise men.
After, there’s no real going back.
Physics can’t be avoided.
So a star never is
as it appears
when it appears
by the time its light arrives,
so the brightest
never satisfies. 