My life in the Oort Cloud was dreamy and endless,
frozen and dozing in coldness and black.
But curving my orbit were forces relentless
and gentle, all the time calling me back.
Now I have turned, and now I am falling,
quickening swiftly along through the night.
This is my path now: I follow the calling,
into the warming and into the light.
Such is the cycle of our relation:
eternities of separation,
blackness and blindness and ice, and then,
trailing glorious sublimation,
bathed in rays of blazing ablation,
I court annihilation again.
San Jose
August 28, 1998