Buddha's Birthday!

Happy eighth day of national poetry month, and Buddha's birthday (in Japan)!

I was listening to an episode of Radiolab this morning about scientific discoveries. What caught me particularly about this episode (though most of them bring me close to tears), was the discussion involving globular clusters, the formation of stars, and the period table. This took me back to a month ago, when I drove from Santa Fe to the McDonald Observatory in the Davis mountains of west Texas. I was attending a star party that evening, and popped into one of the various lectures that was going on, just in time to catch a few pieces of information which almost knocked me over. It is this information which the Radiolab episode brought to mind, and which I am now stirring and stewing into a poem. First, that our atoms are born of supernovas, which are where the densest elements like iron and calcium come from. Imagine, we have starstuff in our bones.
Second, that there is no shape to the universe.
And then there was a random assortment of words and phrases so beautiful that I can't stop shaping them with my mouth, tasting them, typing them on the page to admire their form: paralex, angular shift, ressession velocity.
All galaxies are moving away from us,
and,
distances are measured by brightness.

So I haven't worked on the novel today, but their are plenty of words in my thoughts.
Hopefully a poem will climb out of them soon.