I was thinking about the stars last night, how I have two competing concepts of the night sky. One is the myth-informed notion of the stars as a celestial background to human lives and the other is as vastly distant suns, all furious science. These competing conceptions left me unable to pursue a single vision in peace.

It started me wondering where a poem comes from. Is it from a single vision? So I close my mind to the stars as nuclear hot houses and go with stars as a heavenly landscape. Or does a poet have to embrace the competing visions and build a poem in that tension?