On Method -- Mary Margaret Sloan

The images are silent: gleaming, tainted codicils
keeping their distance and details intact.
In locum tenens, a forest sweeps its silence forward,
deserting the mean values of the optical constants.

None could staunch our curiosity as to the course
of the only perennial stream, throwing all forethought
as far as a frontier, as far as its setting
in a red shift, as all recognitions recede
from one another, from what is understood.

Sights foraged from fields
as flowers at a distance might pass
for constellations, galaxies of variables.
Absolute magnitude bewilders emotion.