You and I are not suns

You and I are
not suns, aeons apart, vibrating
slow churning cello-strings of space;
we are not trees who staring unforgetting
at the sky thousands of days at a time
find that they understand stars
much more clearly than you or I.

No we are not very old yet,
our rings will be fewer than our
backyard tree and still fewer than
Saturn's long strands of ancient hair
(fed by the very stones of eternity)
no, we will never be that far apart—
two thousand miles at the most,
maybe just chairs away at the least.

Still, I hear your voice as clear
as emptiness when I am wandering
down the short trails of your handwriting
on an old scrap of paper, also when I am
praying myself into galaxies so distant
even God himself should sleep
half the journey.