DECLA(RE)(MA)TION WITH BONKEI

i am as much a cosmographer –and i declar/me this
without fear of mockery– as i am a poet, but
knowing this to be somehow true and false has
not stopped me from gazing up at what passes above
–a sense of wonder, not unlike the feeling
of happily letting my eyes fall into the
hidden universe between a pair of legs– nor
has it diminished my resolve to shape this work
in miniature, pruning its least felicitous verses,
just as the impavid Japanese gardener does
with his bonkei, whose delicate art
encapsulates a planet in its likeness to the
ancient and still unheard, at least by me,
music of the spheres, which i know only
through others, just like the craft of poetry