In the back streets of a starport city
the drifter waits out the short years
with assorted otherworldly cronies
and an occasional native concubine.

Circling too close for comfort
to a brilliant white dwarf,
sweltering beneath the cloud-clotted skies,
the drifter waits out the short years,
no longer bothering with conversions.

The natives here are blue-skinned
and angular, yet they are humanoid,
soft in the right places,
as graceful as the saplings of
…but he can no longer recall
the name of that planet.

Each day he crosses the muggy streets
to read the notices on a union board:
Europa, Class AA tonnage, Earth Registry,
inbound for Sol by way of Bryan’s Star,
WANTED: one mate, two mechs, one ‘gator.

His skills are many, his papers in order,
but they tell him he is too old
for the rigors of stardrive,
too old to ride the spokes of light
like fire in his thighs,
too old to brave the vacuum.

#

Zenthyl, his friend from Nuvie IV,
claims that any land is lovable.
Take a steady mate, Zenthyl counsels,
forget the foolishness of starlust.
Yet Zenthyl’s skin does not rot
in the damp of this greenhouse world.

So he works the docks
and saves what money he can,
handling crates hammered under other skies,
the stuff of alien worlds
passing beneath his calloused hands.

On the dark slate walls of his hut,
with a stub of chalk,
while curious children watch
and others shake their heads
at the inscriptions of a madman,
he draws the constellations
he can no longer see.

Where to go?—where to go?—
once he has saved the passage.
His only home
the emptiness between worlds,
gravity free he dreams the stars,
the tachyon drive spitting at his back,
the singing fission.

#

Drinking in a spacer’s bar is costly,
so some nights he drinks alone.
And when he has had his fill
he staggers into the tepid night,
bare to the waist, his belly
gray-haired and round as a pot,
still hard beneath the aging flesh.

His eyes and thoughts are empty.
There is an incandescence in his heart,
a wilderness of light; above there is
nothing but a vague gray blackness.

If only he could see the stars:
giant red Betelgeuse,
bright Procyon with its host of planets,
Alcor and Mizar in their flaming binary dance.
But those are only names,
and beyond the closely packed cloud cover
he can no longer be sure they remain.

In a score of short years
he will heed wise Zenthyl’s advice.
He will take a steady blue woman.
Instead of stars
he will dream the impossible child
of their impossible union.

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