Welcome to “Poetry at The Arts Fuse.” A new poem every Thursday.

Rowdy Astronomers Out There

The recently in grad-school science friends
just got excited by the night
and had seen
Oppenheimer and were liking
all that scientific boning, booming,
and then had gotten some beer
and pizzas, and one
spotted by a cloud
between the apexes
of two roofs
a star and indicated
where another star
should be with no houses
and no trees and just horizon,
and Alpha Kermit
kept booming
adenoidal but also looked, and soon
all five of them
were looking
at pointing and looked like a group
of songsters not quite dancers called
The Five Tops,
the kind of tops
from planetarium gift shops
with red space-age glass
in them and spun
by pulling wound strings
and made of brass
and turning on brass nubs
almost like the pens
in the old-fashioned banks
attached to chains
and penholders
bolted from below
the marble solids.
“It’s there.” “It’s there.”
“I see it,” all of them
banging away
into each other
butting their heads up
into outer space.

David Blair is the author of five books of poetry and a collection of essays. His latest book True Figures: Selected Shorter Poems and Prose Poems, 1998-2021 is available from MadHat Press. He teaches poetry in the MFA Writing Program at the University of New Hampshire and lives in Somerville, Massachusetts, with his wife and daughter.

Note: Hey poets! We seek submissions of excellent poetry from across the length and breadth of contemporary poetics. See submission guidelines here. The arbiter of the feature is the magazine’s poetry editor, John Mulrooney.

— Arts Fuse editor Bill Marx