The December sky is dense with constellations--the Great Bear, the Little Dipper with its North Star, Cassiopeia, Orion, Gemini--whose figures in Greek, Arabic, Norse, and Native myths walk the sparkling Spirit Path above our heads. Among them flows a caravan of multicolored jewels: stars, star clusters, planets, vivid nebulae, Magellanic Clouds, and other galaxies like our own Milky Way. Where are they all going, and we with them? To the black hole at the center of our galaxy, through a forest of Dark Matter, to a quantum physics oblivion; to Bethlehem?

Kent Gramm is the author of Nature's Bible: The Old Testament Through the Eyes of Creation; November: Lincoln's Elegy at Gettysburg; Bitterroot: An American Epic; Cars: A Romantic Manifesto; The Prayer of Jesus: A Reading of the Lord's Prayer; Sharpsburg: A Civil War Narrative; Brothers Gone Before; Psalms for Skeptics, and other books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. Visit www.kentgramm.com for descriptions and more information.