34 Stars poems

Tonight I look at the stars I try to count them and I fall asleep Tonight I'll have a dream and all around all I'll see ii will be you

Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art— Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night And watching, with eternal lids apart, Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite, The moving waters at their priestlike task Of pure ablution round earth's human shores, Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask Of snow upon the mountains and the moors— No—yet still stedfast, still unchangeable, Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast, To feel for ever its soft fall and swell, Awake for ever in a sweet unrest, Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath, And so live ever—or else swoon to death.

The sky hangs up its starry pictures: a swan, a crab, a horse. And even though you’re three hundred miles away, I know you see them, too. Right now, my side of the bed is empty, a clear blue lake of flannel. The distance yawns and stretches. It’s hard to remember we swim in an ocean of great love, so easy to fall into bickering like little birds at the feeder fighting over proso and millet, unaware of how large the bag of grain is, a river of golden seeds, that the harvest was plentiful, the corn is in the barn, and whenever we’re hungry, a dipperful of just what we need will be spilled . . .

The stars are Although I do not sing About them— The sky and the trees Are indifferent To whom they please The rose is unmoved By my nose And the garland in your hair Although your eyes be lakes, dies Why sigh for a star Better bay at the moon Better bay at the moon . . . Oh moon, moon, moon

I went out at night alone; The young blood flowing beyond the sea Seemed to have drenched my spirit’s wings— I bore my sorrow heavily. But when I lifted up my head From shadows shaken on the snow, I saw Orion in the east Burn steadily as long ago. From windows in my father’s house, Dreaming my dreams on winter nights, I watched Orion as a girl Above another city’s lights. Years go, dreams go, and youth goes too, The world’s heart breaks beneath its wars, All things are changed, save in the east The faithful beauty of the stars.

The parrot, Einstein of birds, who can count and reason calmly in our tongue while outliving us, disdains the ostrich. For all its sprint records, the ostrich will be remembered for hiding from the truth. You can’t outrun stupid. We the people hold some truths to be self-evident: our magnificent brain in a body that can’t flee, can’t smell fear, can’t hear death, can’t see straight. Even so, our retinas, with rods and cones as intricate as any telescope array, evolved to see a predator slide out of oblique shadow and give us time to bolt. We survey our closed dominion until we look up in August to find comet dust flaring in the night. This vastness, this vertiginous awareness mocking gravity on our speck of now, wakes us with a recalibrating jolt. But soon our familiar star will claw toward us in seven-league boots from the east, drawing its Valium thread across our planet as if to cloak a birdcage to muffle questions that blink through dark matter and would pour over us until we drowned, dreaming of amnesia.

On a backwards-running clock in Lisbon, By the marble statue of Pessoa; On an antique astrolabe in London Tracing out the sky above Samoa, Thousands of miles away—in time, in place, Each night conspires to create a myth That stands for nothing real, yet leaves you with The vague impression of a human face. The fragments fly apart and shift, trembling On the threshold of a kind of fullness: The minor wonder of remembering; The greater wonders of forgetfulness. For one looks back as someone else might yearn For a new life, and set his course upon The polestar, bid his adieus, and move on. The journey takes a solipsistic turn, Forsaking starlight for an inner glow, And reducing all human history, All human culture—highbrow, middle-, low-— To one reflecting surface, one story. What fills the heaven of a single mind? The things that used to fill Kant’s mind with awe —“The starry heavens and the moral law”— Seem distant now, and difficult to find Amid the message of satiety Issuing from the corners of the sky, Filled with monotonous variety: Game shows, an interview with Princess Di, And happy talk, and sitcoms and the news, The shit that floats across your living room Each weekday evening. Waiting in the pews, Out in the desert where the cacti bloom, Something else was forming, something stranger Gathering in the gulf below the stairs— As though the mystery of the manger Were written in the day-to-day affairs Of a world consecrated to Mammon, Yet governed by those sacred absences That make the spirit soar, and presences At one remove, like the sound of Cuban Drumbeats issuing from the Ricardos’ Love nest on the television station Like distant thunder; or Leonardo’s “Wave that flees the site of its creation.” In the desert far beyond the city, One hears the cadences for which one longs, The lyrics of those half-forgotten songs, —Some of them poignant, some of them witty— Brimming with the melody of passage; One feels the wind that blows the soul about, Repeating its inscrutable message; And as night falls, one sees the stars come out. I found myself beneath a canopy Of scenes left out of someone else’s life —The dog that didn’t bark, Rosebud, Cain’s wife— Arrayed above me in a panoply Of glittering debris, gigantic swirls Of stars, and slowly moving caravans Of stars like tiny Christmas lights or pearls Of tapioca, floating in a danse macabre across the heavens as I stood, Watching the pageant in the sky unfold. I felt the chill of something much too old To comprehend—not the Form of the Good, But something inchoate and violent, A Form of Darkness. Suddenly the songs Floating through the revelry fell silent, As in The Masque of the Red Death, as throngs Of the dead twinkled at me from above. The intimate domain of memory Became an endless field of entropy Transfigured, inking in the outlines of Eurydice entombed, Orpheus immured, And, in the center of their universe, That subtler diadem of stars obscured By the brighter constellations, the Hearse. Standing off to one side, as though bereft, There was a figure with averted eyes, Gesturing in a language of surprise That took possession of my heart, yet left The question of her meaning unresolved. I looked at her. It was time to begin. The apparations in the sky dissolved, Leaving me alone, and growing old. In The wide, unstructured heavens overhead The stars were still shining. When I got home, The message light was blinking on the phone. I don’t remember what the message said.

The poppies start as aliens end as husbands, a pause of light, a dull scatter. Transports dandelion clouds. Venus passes between sun & earth. Exceedingly rare, Transit, have you noticed how close the ode & elegy are? (In the United States someone dies every sixteen seconds!) Husband, Supermoon, Venus come & go. Death says there is no you at the end of weather. "Among the rarest of all predictable astronomical . . ." Husband presented me. The weatherman says we are locked in the clouds.

Twinkle, twinkle, little star, How I wonder what you are! Up above the world so high, Like a diamond in the sky. When the blazing sun is gone, When he nothing shines upon, Then you show your little light, Twinkle, twinkle, all the night. Then the traveler in the dark Thanks you for your tiny spark, How could he see where to go, If you did not twinkle so? In the dark blue sky you keep, Often through my curtains peep For you never shut your eye, Till the sun is in the sky. As your bright and tiny spark Lights the traveler in the dark, Though I know not what you are, Twinkle, twinkle, little star.

The sleep of this night deepens because I have walked coatless from the house carrying the white envelope. All night it will say one name in its little tin house by the roadside. I have raised the metal flag so its shadow under the roadlamp leaves an imprint on the rain-heavy bushes. Now I will walk back thinking of the few lights still on in the town a mile away. In the yellowed light of a kitchen the millworker has finished his coffee, his wife has laid out the white slices of bread on the counter. Now while the bed they have left is still warm, I will think of you, you who are so far away you have caused me to look up at the stars. Tonight they have not moved from childhood, those games played after dark. Again I walk into the wet grass toward the starry voices. Again, I am the found one, intimate, returned by all I touch on the way.