Gaslight

Tonight, after I saw my mother to bed, I stepped out
onto the street, to look for that supernova I had read
was ?brightening by the minute?, a mere
21 million light years near,
somewhere to the left of The Big Dipper.

But this being the light-swamped suburbs,
and the moon being there along with the last rags
of cloud from a rain-haunted day, and me having no
decent binoculars or even any real clue
where I was looking (East?) or where the Dipper
was hung on its North Star nail, I almost turned

back indoors. Then I saw, whitely burning
(almost as bright as a distantly approaching plane)
something that must have been Venus, fixed for the moment
above the darker less presentable side
of our early Victorian house, drain-piped, dull
apart from one lit, arched, stained-glass window
where the original owners, the Browns, had their chapel.

Or so the old man I once met on this avenue
told me. He remembered serving there as an alter boy,
and was probably dead by now. I looked from the star
to the churchy window pretty as an Advent calendar,
then back to the star, thinking of its death throes
travelling pointedly, if aimlessly, and of the flaring
and dimming generations in one old house
and priests and alter boys and all the gas-lit masses.