Mars was a stoplight in the north sky, the only real meat on the night’s black bones, and I said: Mars, why be parsimonious? You’ve got a million tricks stashed in your orbital back hills; chicory suns bobbing in viridian lagoons; quasars dwindling near the speed of light; pinwheel, dumbbell, and impacted galaxies; epileptic nuclei a mile long; vampiric moons; dicotyledon suns; whorling dustbowls of umbilical snow; and milky ways that, on the slant, look like freshly fed pythons.
diane ackerman