Centaur over Tomer Butte

Robert Wrigley

Tomer Butte, named for George Washington Tomer,
who arrived in 1871 to formalize its theft.  
As for Sagittarius, at the edge of the center

of the Milky Way, the combined distances
between its stars is forever. Some of those are also
not there since prior to this morning—also known

as 1871—when the people who were here
called the stars what the stars were called then.
Which was referred to as now in some circles.

Even now it looks more like a teapot
pouring into the black cup of a summer night
a brew darker than a pine forest in the new moon.

At the university there’s a map that shows
with dots of black ink all the lightning strikes
on Tomer Butte since the last of the nineteenth century.

What lives on that map never sees the light,
and Tomer Butte was a significant mountain once,
before lava from the west filled its valley in.

Then came the part of forever from that point to Mr. Tomer,
with me breathing down his neck for a while in a further forever,
where everything is or becomes a ghost.

Do not assume the ghosts were birthed by other ghosts.
Sagittarius has an arrow drawn at the very heart
of Scorpio, who stung Orion to death.

It’s not so much that the language of poetry
sells us everything we think we need. We need it.
By what law did Sagittarius make his squatter’s claim

on a place that doesn’t exist, except that
we think we can see it, just above Tomer Butte?
For as Scorpio rises, Orion goes down.

Copyright © 2025 by Robert Wrigley. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on January 15, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.

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about this poem

“History, myth, geology, and geography; astronomy; the illusion and hard fact of time; local matters and those beyond the reach of the James Webb Telescope; the howls of coyotes; satellites passing overhead. Every night, my wife and I spend a few hours outside—not easy in winter, in north Idaho. We talk about what we see (stars, moonlit mountains and ridges, shadows of pines, lights twinkling from town). We talk about what we know and what we imagine. From such conversations, from time to time, come poems. Like this one.”
—Robert Wrigley

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