This is such a soft machine,
such a silent apparatus;
I can hardly hear it

yet it's been laboring without pause
for seventy-one years

I am continuously lifted
”in a light that is not of day”,
out of the anonymity of blind matter
by this machine
bewitched by stars,
sailing stellar winds,
riding elements flowing
out of helium crucibles,
with eyes that are inter-stellar probes,
inter-galactic lumen-lovers
feeding the cerebral hemispheres
their intra-cerebral vibrations
on which my self-awareness dances
its incantations, its conjurations,
its administrations
of probable causes,
of means and opportunities,
as earthly skies of July fill up
with gray-scales and ionizations
and my system of thoughts
forms the image
of a glass harmonica
brittle under rolling thunder;
an insistent vulnerability