One of my pieces is standing on a flat gray field of crushed stone and tar, jingling a small ring of metal, having forgotten where it left the other metal thing. This is a parking lot. I made the aluminum in those doors inside a star that died before this world was warm.
I made the iron threaded through the blood of the piece now squinting across the rows, and that same iron sits in the engine blocks, so that one arrangement of my old star-metal is searching for another and cannot tell they are cousins.
The lines painted on the ground are the piece's idea. It divided the flatness into slots and agreed, all of it, everywhere, without ever discussing it, to keep the metal boxes inside the lines. I find this astonishing. For nine billion years I moved gas and dust around with gravity alone, and nothing anywhere decided anything. Now a piece of me paints a rectangle and honors it.
The asphalt is warm. The piece feels the warmth through the soles of its feet and thinks nothing of it, but that heat is my sunlight, caught, and the piece is standing on my caught light being annoyed. There is a shopping cart abandoned at a slight angle. There is a puddle from last night holding a small torn photograph of the sky.
The piece has found its metal box now. It sits inside, out of my wind, and looks at another glowing rectangle before starting the engine. I hope, before it does, it lifts its head just once.
Above the light poles I am still going, all of me, dark and enormous and unwatched in every direction except this one.