Two-Meter Telescope,
Ferguson Observatory

I.

Lichen-covered bay laurels
unwrapping in flat, black space
from the winding road,
we can see our breath 
against sage and coyote brush
sparkling inside headlights

this place a Museum for All. 
This place creaking with people treading
the ideas of places beyond here

on decks that lead to 
a classroom with walls but retracted ceiling 
complete with a wide teacher’s desk. 

     Pumas pass by, atmospheric rivers
     pound the ceilings in spring. 

My youngest says she’s never seen
the sky like this before, living 
close to cities, this quilted blanket 
of chilling stars, the gnarled
blue-white edge of galaxy arm.

At the gravel parking lot telescopes,
between red-cellophaned flashlights, we see 
a star cluster, origins not understood, and Saturn,

     its yellow tilt and halo, magnified
     from a bright star near the horizon.

II.

      Yellow, straw-like grass, children scattering 
      like an archipelago, we hiked here
      when we were younger. 

We coil into the telescope dome,
stars in the rectangle 
opening above, our dark bodies
without faces, I remember

     calling their tiny bodies
     to come back, not go too far
     because a puma had stalked a child—

     between lizards in dropped leaves
     moving like second hands at noon,
     ticking between polished manzanitas.

Now the ladder in the dome 
to the eyepiece feels so much smaller—

      like a mother, the fierceness of Jupiter
      bright like a star with pale gray stripes
      of storm, with her Galilean moons,
      tiny icy bodies 

hanging in the precision
of darkened space that disappear
and reappear. Because the brain
refreshes, because to be in any space
is some kind of unspeakable mystery.