Orion

I am told that, in a time before history, someone carved you in ivory.

Recognized around the world by different names, stars so far apart, unrelated, unconnected, yet a picture forms so easily to our human minds.

I saw you in Ohio, myself a child. In the yard at night outside my childhood home, in the branches of a tree where I would climb and play nonsense on a wooden flute, imagining myself connected to worlds long dead.

There was a night, a kindness, a friend held close in the early autumn chill. My father, he'd come out in the boat in the dark to fetch us. We'd been driving all day and facing flooded roads and so many delays. What should have been 12 hours came closer to 20. It's a pain, taking the boat out in the dark, but my father was there – he never wouldn't have been. And I held my friend, imagined her more for a moment serene and surreal, and looked up at you, immortal hunter in the sky.

Outside the palace in Babel, the gutted and looted hulk left from Saddam, they'd truck up water every day and refill the water buffalo – a trailer and tank for the purpose of field hygiene and hydration. I still recall just as well the night, standing off a ways with my water bottle and wetting my toothbrush, looking up and seeing you there.

In Montana, out in my yard at night and thinking on the life I imagined I was making there, I remember the times I saw you overhead. You were there with Buddy and I when we'd take our slow walks around my small property, that strange, wonderful old cat prowling and probing the edges of the wood. He'd go too far, I'd call his name, he'd come back, and I'd always chuckle, then sigh and look up for you. Going inside my small home, I'd make coffee or tea, give Buddy a snack, and one for myself, and set to the tasks in the life of a middle-aged man living with cats.

Buddy's gone now, resting in his spot at the edge of that wood, his sister by his side, and as you have for thousands of years, you stand guard in the night sky. I'd like to think you guard over them as well. Tell Buddy I miss him, if you think to, when you see him.

Tonight I looked for you in yet another foreign sky, talking with my young friend about all the other times you have punctuated my memories. I have always sought you for the sense of the familiar, the hint of home, the connection between the unconnected. And you have never failed.

Still, you were not there tonight, old friend. It was too early and you still hid beneath the edge of sky, at that border, just beyond the reach of eyes.

I wonder, did that carver some tens of thousands of years before Rome was Rome or even Alexander set his sites on the world, did that carver wander far from home? Did that carver share you with friends and with loves? Did that carver look to you, as I do, and recall the bits gained and lost and buried and gone?

And how many thousands of years from this time will some other, like us, do the same?

I can only wonder, and think of connections and constellations, of points of light with no relation to one another other than our perspectives, of paintings and pictures imposed onto a universe that does not ask for it. I think of my own constellations, and the lines I draw from one point to another, the shapes that they take that – even like constellations on a cosmic scale of time – shift with my changing perspectives and the progression of time.

Yet here we are, and here we must be.

And your stars are further than most, will hold their shape quite well against the ages. Long after even my bones are dust, you will still take your warrior's pose in earth's night sky. You have outlasted empires, and will outlast more. Rocks will wear before even one of your stars has exploded and died.

I envy you your very long mortality, and perhaps I am the fool for that. Perhaps that sentiment will morph again in time with changes in perspective. Perhaps, when my time comes, I will still miss Buddy, but be happy to follow his path, a path far too many I love have already taken.

But I envy you still, would love to know the child a thousand years from now – if there is still a place on earth where stars can be seen – who will look up at you and form that first memory. I'd like to give that child a wooden flute, and tell them tales of civilizations vanished whole beneath your watch. I'd love to encourage them to imagine those who have looked up at you before, and those unborn who will look upon you yet.

Because, if we are not here to imagine constellations, I can find no reason for us to be here at all.