They come to me in flashes, the astrologers,
in woodcuts and watermarks, sifting the stars down

through a gauze of glyph and scribble: one,
in tufted sleeves, rousing the Roundhead guards,

gibbering augeries; and another, divining
defeats, compassing silently under the spilled light

of a Cavalier moon. But it’s a third my mind pinches
to conjure—his frowzed beard spinning

operas of rhombi, agonies of sphere.
Plucking the teeth of his astrolabe, he feels it—

the future splitting into slides: first a plague,
a fever, then a great fire. He blinks, and now

it’s a darkening fleet, a factory’s brick throat,
air-pumps dissecting breath, and, nearer now,

acid furring a birdless sky; an arid clenching of leaves,
the groan of oceans bulging. And there,

in the final frame, something more precise:
hands trembling in a library; an almanac

falling from my view; life’s unfathomable
constellations fizzling out.

Original appearance in Oxford Poetry.