Audio: Read by the author.

They were unutterably lovely, the aliens,

when finally we knew them, when at last we understood

they had lived and moved among us from the beginning

in bodies the image of ours, though smoother, eyes wider,

as if the world were a little darker for them, or more wondrous,

and we loved them as wildly and deeply and helplessly

as our first loves, our dreams, our lost ones, all at once,

though we knew they were wilder and deeper than we were, and freer,

and loving them only deepened our loneliness.

When they gathered on evening corners, faintly luminous,

and their murmuring rose in urgency, calling on stars,

we feared they would leave us for worlds far, far beyond us,

though we dared not ask, in their language so eerily ours,

Will you carry us with you?—lest they look away, bored

with our dullness, our burdensome love, our ignorant dying.

What could we, after all, with our dim minds, our narrowed sensoria,

know of the lightning of their thoughts, the storm of their joys?—

or their sorrows, for sorrow was theirs, they were lords of sorrow.

Why in the world these creatures, immortal and perfect,

should be so gloomy and aimless was beyond us,

yet they grew so slowly into the unprecedented lives

we had thought they would seize instantly as their right

that it seemed the long long future brooding over them

was so heavy they could hardly bear it forward one little step.

And at last they dismissed the fantastic travels, faster than light,

that had landed them only here, and their magic technologies

that had taught them, it seemed, what anyone could have told them,

and they ceased to gather on corners, dreaming of rescuers,

and glanced, if at all, only sidelong at the stars.

Maybe some earthly pathogen had worn them,

or the weakness of our yellow sun had left them so wan

that even their radiant children could not tell them from us

when they sat with us, sipping at coffee, a little more patiently now,

enduring our sadness, our sad adoration, even our sad relief

that life was a little less possible than once we had hoped,

and gratefully meeting our eyes, since who else in the universe knew

that they were as luminous and unutterably lovely

as our first loves, our dreams, our lost ones all at once,

so impossible they were beautiful, so beautiful they were true?