How to See the Milky Way: Instructions for Being More Alive

We spend our lives trying to see our own light, to catch its surprising refractions on the face of the world, to play in its waterfalling golden blue radiance until we are ready to lie down in the bright black of time as the stars go on spinning, their fractured hieroglyphics encoding the memory and mystery of being alive.

Sarah Williams — one of the five wonderful women in my intergenerational poetry group — offers a shimmering set of instructions for how to do that in her splendid poem “How to...