On the radio the scientist is speaking of other earths.

There are in light red shifts and blue shifts

and some people learn to read in these

the probability of planets that might harbor life—

Our life, perhaps? the fossil-voiced host suggests,

whose despair over what our species has wrought

is countered by wonderment that we—and in particular she—

might wrest from death a whole new world.

She is vivid and avid, this scientist, effably intelligent,

and despite myself what lizards into me

are multiple moons and dunes and other obvious

and no doubt inappropriate planetary metaphors

for a beautiful nude.

And God? the host asks shyly. Religion and all that?

(Who hung the moon and the stars,

I think, and changes deep darkness into morning.)

I want to kill it, she glees. 

We’ve lost one world to illusions. That’s enough.

Some people read the stars, some people read people,

some sit in a vise of silence trawling God.

Love and death, love and death, red shift, blue shift.