Look up; this is your map to the past;
the Sun (don't stare, avoid the ultra-
violet gaze) isn't the Sun of now, but
the Sun of eight minutes ago, fun fair
reflections on tape delay; the Moon
lives with the leisure of lower latency;
it is, for our purposes here, a live
broadcast; the smaller the speck of
light, the likelier that what you're looking
at is an afterglow; assume low levels of
light pollution, assume an open field
near a sparsely-populated village,
assume the functional apocalypse of
a big enough electromagnetic pulse,
assume analog's actual last stand
as you connect celestial dots in
deafening silence; here you will see
a firmament full of obituaries,
pointillist portraits in chondrite ink
[...]
[tk]
the most common thing in the universe
isn't hydrogen, but empty space and
static; creation is a hole we have all
fallen into [...]
