Index for Celestian Mechanics:
A “Tome Of Stars” Companion
Celestial Mechanics: Introduction
The eight new poems in Celestial Mechanics are not part of the core of Tome of Stars, but are closely aligned with the original work. The Stargirl's memory is sewn in every song.
When the poet finished Tome of Stars, and because He Who Cries Out Wants to be Heard, at first he followed a path in publishing that was familiar to him (from many years of traditional and self-publishing his novels). He prepared a "query letter" for agents to consider representing the work to publishers. To quickly give them a sense of both the nature of the work (a big book of love-lorn sonnets), he wrote the sonnet Queried Letters and placed it at the beginning of the communication to agents.
As he began sending these out, his feelings changed. He came to view the manuscript as too personally sacred to subject it to commercial publication or to reduce it (at least in the eyes of publishers) to a profit-associated venture. He stopped and decided to make the book available in multiple free electronic and audio formats, and to offer printed editions solely at production cost.
As he began using generative music to "songify" his poems, what was initially just Queried Letters developed into its own album, Celestial Mechanics with seven other songs added (as well as multiple musical variations on several of the poems).
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Unlike Tome of Stars, which was completely driven by the narrative of love and loss in the poet's life, the "companion" albums were produced in order to make more music of poetry. The poet was so moved and amazed by the ability of generative music to render verse in moving songs that he felt a pull to produce more.
This engendered additional poems, some as sonnets, some in other forms, some from the story of the poet and beloved, some taken from other writings that indirectly touch upon this story (e.g., excerpts from the poet's novels, some of which, as the poem Consummation describes, were (at the time of writing) unconscious efforts to tell their story in some transformed manner). One album is not the poet's works at all, but a songification of some famous and favorite poems in the English language from the past (Better Voices). Another (First Love) goes back to verse from the youth of the poet and his first love, the "fairy springtide spawned" from the poem Trilogy.
A final effort (likely final) is a choral album (A Choral Dream) putting together some of the choral pieces from previous albums as well as generating choral versions of some songs. This latter album is to be accompanied by free, downloadable, transcribed sheet music from those songs (as well as a book collecting all the sheet music to be sold at cost). The "likely final" possesses uncertainty because it is possible that the poet will generate additional sheet music for other songs and make those available. It is even possible the depression hanging over him will sometimes mitigate enough for him to produce more poems and songs. He doesn’t want to rule anything out.
Tagorean Melange
Those who are near me do not know
that you are nearer to me than they.
Those who speak to me do not know
that my heart bursts with unspoken words.
Those who crowd my path do not know
that I walk ever alone with you.
In the dusky path of a dream
I went to seek the love
who was mine in a former life.
Her house stood at the end of a desolate street.
In the evening breeze her pet peacock sat drowsing on its perch,
and the pigeons were silent in their corner.
She set her lamp down by the portal and stood before me.
She raised her large eyes to my face
and mutely asked, “Are you well, my friend?”
I tried to answer, but our language had been lost and forgotten.
I thought and thought; our names would not come to my mind.
Tears shone in her eyes. She held up her right hand to me.
I took it and stood silent.
Our lamp had flickered in the evening breeze and died.
I seem to have loved you in numberless forms, numberless times…
In life after life, in age after age, forever.
My spellbound heart has made and remade the necklace of songs,
That you take as a gift, wear round your neck in your many forms,
In life after life, in age after age, forever.
She who ever had remained in the depth of my being,
in the twilight of gleams and of glimpses;
she who never opened her veils in the morning light,
will be my last gift to thee, my God, folded in my final song.
I walk ever alone with you
I walk ever alone with you
I walk ever alone with you
Our lamp had flickered in the evening breeze
I walk ever alone with you
Our lamp had flickered in the evening breeze
She opened the morning light
in age after age
She opened the morning light
in age after age
She opened the morning light
Forever
Forever
in age after age
I walk, my last gift
She is, after age
I walk, my last gift
She is
Our lamp had flickered in the evening breeze
I walk ever alone with you
Our lamp had flickered in the evening breeze
She opened the morning light
In age after age
She opened the morning light
In age after age
She opened the morning light
Forever
Forever
In age after age
Forever
Forever
Our lamp had flickered in the evening breeze
In age after age forever
Our lamp had flickered in the evening breeze
Forever
Forever
In age after age
Forever
This is a combination of lines from three of Rabindranath Tagore's poems, adapted to the poet's personal experiences and set to music. Themes of eternal and transcendent love. The beloved introduced the poet to Tagore, and was especially pleased he found so much of value in his poetry: “The one thing that does give me great pleasure is to see how much Tagore has touched you..we are connected in one more way now..When I read the Gitanjali now, I think you might be reading it at the very same moment...it is as if our fingers touch on the same page..”
The poet apologizes for shifting the verse of one line. Tagore's original is "she who never opened her veils in the morning light". This occurs in the song, but in the "outro" portion of the song is added "She opened the morning light", a line not in Tagore’s poems and with quite a different meaning in this adaptation of Tagore to the poet's experience. But for those unfamiliar with the original, please note the change.
Dream 81277
I perished in an unmade firmament, unspun,
Each molecule divided and undone.
My atoms bled; quelled quarks dissolved in dreams,
And strings unbraided into primal screams.
Each cached domain became a shadowed sea,
Each finite shard unveiled infinity.
And yet, while plunging through that chasm’s core,
Firm hands rebuilt reflections of before.
No flesh, no thought, no spirit stayed the same;
Eternity recast my mortal frame.
No lord of light, nor saint in astral choir,
To which mere deities dared not aspire.
You may have called it God; I did not know.
And through its eyes I watched creation grow,
Not downward, ruling from celestial height,
But upward, seeking yet a greater light.
A being vast, yet only one of more,
A particle within a vaster shore.
I drowned beneath those atoms, bright, divine,
Churned surf of gods that shimmered, each a shrine.
Beyond that sea rose hierarchies of flame,
Whose sciences were prayer, each thought, a name.
So Icarus would burn again, sight blind,
And radiance erased my sequent mind.
The ladder shattered; every light was stilled,
And silence spread, each cosmos ever filled.
I plunged through nothing, past all sense and plan,
And woke reborn upon soft shores of sand.
The sea was warm; the air was sweet with dawn,
I breathed and knew the cosmic night had gone.
Most cherished in this morning's light sublime,
Your soul, Beloved, stood silent by my side.
We gazed in understanding without sound,
As cosmic currents churned in dance profound.
For even gods, in their assembled grace,
May wake as dust, and find a human face.
Dream 81277 is a versification of a scene from one of the poet's novels, recounting a transformative cosmic event. He will not examine this too closely for fear of revealing the novel and identifying himself, which could lead to identifying others in the narrative. Overall, this is a first person perspective of a cosmic “unmaking” and “reassembly and recreation,” combining aspects of multi-universes, scaling of structure, and spiritual concerns. It descends from the ultra-cosmic to the personal from beginning of the verse to the end, hypothesizing that even in the small and finite there are echoes of greater and more “divine” superstructure in creation.
As with Song of Solomon (also versified from a novel excerpt), when he manically wrote these books in the deep shadow of the loss of his beloved, he did not realize that he was writing to and about her, as bizarre and unconnected as many elements of the stories appear to be to any real human life.
Song of Solomon
The temple shadowed softly into shade,
And we were woven, wound of one accord,
Suspended where the birth of color played,
Each pulse of light a syllable adored.
Through endless bloom our mingled forms were poured,
Her eyes an oceaned mirror of a whole,
While starlight passed like breath through every soul.
Desire morphed into a living flame,
A hunger not of body, but of will;
Its heat refined base mortal dreams and claims
To transform sight; we trembled, yet were still.
From crest to peak, the cosmos silence filled,
And passion, freed of limits and design,
Drew thought itself into a vast divine.
World followed world, received our skyward trace,
A frozen sea, a cloud of newborn fire;
Each orbit rang a moment’s resting place,
Each sigh, in melody, creation’s choir.
We thrust as time bent inward to conspire,
Our beings tuned to one unspoken law,
That love does not possess but lives in awe.
A Presence flowed, intelligence wrought pure,
Both intimate and endless in its gaze.
It healed our love and sprinkled heartache's cure,
Caress unknown, no poet penned the phrase,
And thereby scattered selves began to raise,
A single chord from what had once been two,
The music in harmonics rich and new.
At last, all laughter mingled with our tears,
And every joy was kin to every grief;
All boundaries melted that marked tragic years,
And trauma found in wonder its relief.
Eternity, an eon past belief,
Flowed through us as a calm, unbreaking sea,
Where all was one, and one was memory.
Song of Solomon is a versification of a chapter of one of the poet's novels, which depicts an intimate encounter as a transformative, cosmic event (he will not examine this too closely for fear of revealing the novel and identifying himself, which could lead to identifying others in the narrative). As with Dream 81277 (also versified from a novel chapter), when he manically wrote these books in the deep shadow of the loss of his beloved, he did not realize that he was writing to and about her, as bizarre and unconnected as many elements of the stories appear to be to any real human life.
The Song of Songs, also called the Canticle of Canticles or the Song of Solomon, is a biblical poem, one of the five megillot ("scrolls") in the Ketuvim ("writings"), the last section of the Tanakh. Unlike other books in the Hebrew Bible, it is erotic poetry; lovers express passionate desire, exchange compliments, and invite one another to enjoy. The poem narrates an intense, poetic love story between a woman and her lover through a series of sensual dialogues, dreams, metaphors, and warnings to the "daughters of Jerusalem" not to awaken love before its time.
Most scholars view the Song of Songs as erotic poetry celebrating human love, not a divine metaphor, with some seeing influences from fertility cults and wisdom literature. Its authorship, date, and origins remain uncertain, with scholars debating its unity, structure, and possible influences from Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and Greek love poetry.
Many Jews read the Song during Passover, a custom first recorded in 8th-century Jund Filastin. Jewish tradition interprets it as an allegory of the relationship between God and Israel. In Christianity, it is viewed as an allegory of Christ and his bride, the Church. -Wikipedia entry, April 10th, 2026
Queried Letters
Blind alchemist, soon branded (binding flame),
Dared cage a star within an earthbound sphere.
Dream-christened Love, he kissed her worshiped name,
A thriving flare that through all chains must sear.
Repurposed ruins, writ in chanted scrolls,
Wild relics salvaged from scorched desert sands.
Sad astral opus, Sing! Spill from your soul
Remembered stars, englyphed by shaking hands.
Bright book of night, bleed pages singed with fire;
Each rhyme a ray from rended heart and mind.
Life's ink, vein-drawn from sorrow and desire,
Ignites new pyres, ashless voids enshrined.
Our flesh will burn. Yet stories do not die;
Hot embers drift, spark verse across the sky.
When the poet finished Tome of Stars, and because He Who Cries Out Wants to be Heard, at first he followed a path in publishing that was familiar to him (from many years of traditional and self-publishing his novels). He prepared a "query letter" for agents to consider representing the work to publishers. To quickly give them a sense of both the nature of the work (a big book of love-lorn sonnets), he wrote the sonnet Queried Letters and placed it at the top of the letter to agents.
As he began sending these out, his feelings changed. He came to view the manuscript as too personally sacred to subject it to commercial publication or to reduce it (at least in the eyes of publishers) to a profit-associated venture. He stopped and decided to make the book available in multiple free electronic and audio formats, and to offer printed editions solely at production cost.
As a brief distillation of Tome of Stars, the poem covers romantic transfiguration, emotional immolation, and, through the fertility of literature to produce more writing, the longevity of story. The author is described as a "blind alchemist," blinded as the verse reveals by trying to "cage a star within an earthbound sphere." This is of course a metaphor for the poet seeking to remain with the Stargirl, a being beyond him, who sears and scars his essence. The first quatrain summarizes this mutilating failure, the second his later efforts to "repurpose" the "ruins" into something else - an alchemy of taking loss, pain, and love and spinning it into Tome of Stars, itself: “writ in chanted scrolls” (here the poet indulges in several word plays from “writ in”/”written” to “in chanted”/”enchanted”).
By the third, he has in hand his “bright book of night” that will “bleed pages singed with fire/Each rhyme a ray from rended heart and mind.” It is a story pulled from his essence, “Life’s ink, vein-drawn from sorrow and desire,” but not simply as a stand alone piece of art. It is instead something that will catalyze further art, something he hopes “ignites new pyres” (the fires “ashless” because it is a fire that does not consume, but engenders). The final couplet continues these ideas, noting the obvious mortality of the poet and all who exist with “our flesh will burn,” contrasted with the ability of narrative to persist beyond the writer as “stories do not die,” stimulating more art: “spark verse across the sky.”
This is not the poet seeking his personal immortality in writing, but instead not wishing this story of love and loss (either aspect) dying in a corner of human history without some effort to hold it up before the world and say, to borrow a bit from Shelley, "Look on our love and loss, brethren, smile, weep, and despair!" The poet is quite satisfied to perish forever in obscurity, but he hopes the story of Stargazer and the Stargirl will "not die" and inspire other artists ("spark verse across the sky").
Bridge of Bones
Meat-inmates mainline love, kiss beauty-pain.
Failed flights to grace compactifying souls.
Just infinitely sprinkle salt and shame,
But bend spacetime to bless a void burnt whole.
Gods build bewitching bridges from our bones,
Piers puzzl'ing minds too proud to comprehend.
Omniscience pierces swamps of sin-steeped groans—
To spirit-singularities descends.
Weird artifacts are woven with the wails
Of agony and ecstasy, entwined.
Tears' tapestries birth ballads, starlit tales,
Dispelling nightmares through caress sublime.
Thus Love most awful, searing, stitches shards,
Unmakings making pure scarred souls, long-marred.
This sonnet was inspired by a half-awake state where the poet considered that so much of his own personal destruction in loss and longing had unmade him, yet left his love for the Stargirl intact. In fact, stripped of so much, he had been "freed" (in some hard to define manner that borders on madness) to love her more deeply. Being constantly purified of ego, demands, and any sense of worthiness or fairness, all that remained to him was adoration and devotion, as if the powers beyond us, should they exist and in whatever form, had smashed and desiccated his bones and built a pathway from them to something more transcendent.
The final line "Love most awful" is pregnant with both the comedic use ("love" with the word "awful" used in the modern sense of terrible mixed with the sly vibe of the song) but also the old meaning, "full of awe", meaning wonder and reverence toward a kind of love that would put us through torture, deconstruct us to our "bones," all to "purify" us beyond our pathologies to become something greater, to be able to love in a manner that transcends our failed forms (“unmakings making pure”).
It made more sense when he was half-asleep.
Stasis
Stargazer spoke,"Snared in this septic sphere,
Groaned gibberish grinds every shadowed sound.
Among our ashen tribes, none dare draw near,
For only in your dance is my heart bound."
"You are life's gravity, my star-bright sky,
Lone pulse in culture's cold, psychotic death.
Long absent, light withdrawn, my cosmos died.
Event horizons swallowed every breath."
"No healing hails, no future cures the past;
The wound is sacred, fathomless, divine.
To love you truly is a prayer so vast,
The universe itself warps, redefined."
"My Stargirl, fusion of all truths I knew,
Cosmogony is born and dies in you."
Stasis is titled to reflect the unchanging status of the Stargirl within the poet. The poems in Celestial Mechanics were written after those in Tome of Stars, and yet the poet found himself unmoved in his deepest feelings. It is both a tragic and joyful sonnet of introspection.
It begins in quatrain one with the darkness of "this septic sphere," the world around him where "groaned gibberish grinds every shadowed sound." The absence of the Stargirl drains life of taste and value. People cannot reach him, certainly no romantic interest as "among our ashen tribes, none dare draw near/For only in your dance is my heart bound."
The remainder of the poem casts the impact of the Stargirl on his awareness in cosmological terms (echoing Shlokam). She is the center of all things, the "lone pulse" in a culture that is "cold" and suffering a "psychotic death." He describes the result of his prolonged grief ("Long absent, light withdrawn") also as a perishing, where his "cosmos died." Black holes return (as in Singularity and Event Horizon), to swallow "every breath." Thus the very proof of his life in respiration has been sent to inaccessible dimensions within the guts of a star's death.
Echoing the sonnet Mangalam, he notes that he entertains no hope for deliverance: "No healing hails, no future cures the past." In fact, like Mangalam's "carve your name across my soul," his pain and grief are "divine", where "the wound is sacred." He is still in a stasis of quixotosis: he continuously prays to love her, to love her "truly," something so impossible and transcendent that to hold it in his heart realigns his cosmos.
Thus the poem ends be declaring the Stargirl to be a "fusion of all truths I knew," where the existential reality (his reality) is created and destroyed by her.
Frequency Modulated
Shine, timeless stellar embrace,
Galaxies kissed beauty, sought bonds, deep,
And hope was spun, born of broken dreams,
A transcendent prayer, apart.
Seek, while shamed, those seas
and spirits staged
A doom embraced
by a thousand cruel fates
Beyond the glow
of silent darkness.
Yet failed flesh breaks,
Chanting warped nights
To sing verse in pure dread,
Whispered by held fairies,
Silenced
and distanced
in blind dreams.
Stargirl's steps sleep in Life's sea,
Where Love's Heaven's sight.
Like Dance, Stars!, Frequency Modulated is an outlier in terms of how it was produced compared to other poems in Tome of Stars or the companion works. In the later stages of editing the main collection, the poet used some automated tools to make word and phrase analyses, looking for verbal "ticks" he knew existed in his writing but to which he’s quite blind while editing. One of the steps was a word frequency analysis, ranking words from most used to least. As he was skimming through the list of words arranged by frequency, despite there being no inherent meaning in the word order, his mind tried to find order and meaning subconsciously, and what he was doing burst into full awareness. Basically, he was trying to associate pieces of the list into meaningful sentences, often dropping in articles or prepositions, conjugating some nouns as verbs, etc, whatever his brain could do to make it non-random.
This suggested a project: make a poem from the word list in this manner. So, that is what he did. He tried to keep the word order unchanged, but through use of punctuation, sentence and line starts and stops, adding articles and prepositions, transforming some nouns to verbs and playing with tense, treating related versions of words as distinct (e.g., star/stars, embrace/embraced, sea/seas). Thereby, he produced Dance, Stars! Later for Celestial Mechanics, he would take the remainder of the list and fashion the poem Frequency Modulated, where he "cheated" a little and switched the order of some words (or the number, going between singular and plural, e.g, dream/dreams) in the list to make it work: hence, "frequency modulated".
However, that title also is a nod to FM radio (which the poet grew up with) where information is stored in the modulation of the radio frequency, because in both these experimental poems, he felt that the word frequency list, in some distorted and compressed form, captured and distilled the essence of Tome of Stars. Of course, that might be his own mind finding meaning in randomness (the manner in which these two poems were indeed produced). But the poet was cognizant that he would often repeat himself in his writings, and certain ideas, and the words that best describe them to him, appear again and again in his prose and poetry. So, perhaps it's not too crazy an idea to think that the word frequency analysis mirrors some aspect of the entire body of work.
Zeta Piscium
How do you love a goddess grown from flame?
What liturgy befits incarnate grace?
Could sacrament the Devi's dance dare tame?
Do truth and madness sing behind that face?
She sighs with morning’s song, embodied sun,
A temple breathing forth hued nebulae.
About her copper grace, white sheets are spun,
With waterfalls of midnight hair set free.
We loved on shores between galactic arms,
Where stars transposed our union into art,
We made those cosmic hymns our endless psalms,
And carved their glory deep into our hearts.
She is my Light, my Star, no night nor void
Have quenched her glow or dreamed my love destroyed.
She is my Light, my Star, no night nor void
Have quenched her glow or dreamed my love destroyed.
Soft sacred sight, a favored few will find;
Her kiss unmakes the madness of mankind.
The sonnet (particularly the first and second quatrains) is inspired by one of the poet's books (like Dream 81277 and Song of Solomon), from a scene pivotal to the novel. The third quatrain’s “We loved on shores between galactic arms” reflects text that calls back to Consummation, where the poet notes that:
In later years, I would rewrite our tale,
Romanticize our shamed and hidden hearts.
In novels spanning space with star-crossed wails,
Our proxies honored love when torn apart.
They kissed on oceaned worlds that swam in seas
Of stars within the Magellanic Clouds,
That overlooked our brilliant galaxy,
With night skies sketched in detonations proud.
The music is based on the melody and chord structure of Polaris from the album Scripture: Item 6 of Tome of Stars. The more psychedelic rock of that song is morphed into a ballad with harp and string and duet/choral arrangements. There is a call-back to Polaris at the end of the song, with the final couplet from that sonnet reappearing to close Zeta Piscium. The poet declines to go into much detail beyond this, for fear of revealing the novel and identifying himself, which could lead to identifying others in the narrative.