CONSTELLATIONS

All that twinkling above us conceals and cants

what's really going on, ice

on Saturn's moon erupting in antic

geysers, old stars collapsing into

black, our own moon's stale

lava hiding water, and the tent

of Jupiter's clouds torn by a comet, the least

shudder in that great web proving nothing's static.

We huddle warily on this blue, tessellated coast.

Only yesterday we shed our rainbow scales.

Only yesterday the gods shook us loose.

Susan Elbe is the author of Eden in the Rearview Mirror (Word Press), which received Honorable Mention for the Posner Poetry Book Prize, and Light Made from Nothing (Parallel Press), a chapbook. Her poems also have appeared in many journals, including Ascent, Blackbird, Calyx, diode, MARGIE, North American Review, Salt Hill, and Smartish Pace. Among her awards and honors are the 2006 Lorine Niedecker Award, the Calyx Lois Cranston Memorial Poetry Prize, and a Rowland Foundation residency at the Vermont Studio Center.