34 Stars poems

Here, the brightest constellation is Hydra, the Water Snake, named for the half-woman, half-reptile whom Hercules slew with the help of  Iolaus, his charioteer. Imagine the sound of so many heads screaming — the long, shrill bays of an angry woman times twenty — and the smell of birth, of all origins, that followed Hydra as she rose from her fetid swamp. Iolaus was strategic, went straight for the bowels instead of the mouth, burned her center before the head. When her fundament was reduced to ash, only then could Hydra be silenced. Hera, enraged that Hercules was able to slay the creature she had raised in order to destroy him, flung the corpse of the decapitated, maimed Hydra into the sky, lest she be forgotten. Hydra’s blood, unstoppable, became hot gas; her screams rose and fell until they were radio waves; and her wild flailing was fixed into points of radiance. Hera was right to hurl those stars here, above this bay, so close to where the earth is bisected, a place where Hydra’s mirror image glosses the water, where dense blooms of  algae flourish on the nitrogen surface, thousands of wild heads and arms devouring ammonia, cyanide, and sewage as fast as we can produce them, this hydra, emblem of insatiable desire.

1. After dark, stars glisten like ice, and the distance they span Hides something elemental. Not God, exactly. More like Some thin-hipped glittering Bowie-being—a Starman Or cosmic ace hovering, swaying, aching to make us see. And what would we do, you and I, if we could know for sure That someone was there squinting through the dust, Saying nothing is lost, that everything lives on waiting only To be wanted back badly enough? Would you go then, Even for a few nights, into that other life where you And that first she loved, blind to the future once, and happy? Would I put on my coat and return to the kitchen where my Mother and father sit waiting, dinner keeping warm on the stove? Bowie will never die. Nothing will come for him in his sleep Or charging through his veins. And he’ll never grow old, Just like the woman you lost, who will always be dark-haired And flush-faced, running toward an electronic screen That clocks the minutes, the miles left to go. Just like the life In which I’m forever a child looking out my window at the night sky Thinking one day I’ll touch the world with bare hands Even if it burns. 2. He leaves no tracks. Slips past, quick as a cat. That’s Bowie For you: the Pope of Pop, coy as Christ. Like a play Within a play, he’s trademarked twice. The hours Plink past like water from a window A/C. We sweat it out, Teach ourselves to wait. Silently, lazily, collapse happens. But not for Bowie. He cocks his head, grins that wicked grin. Time never stops, but does it end? And how many lives Before take-off, before we find ourselves Beyond ourselves, all glam-glow, all twinkle and gold? The future isn’t what it used to be. Even Bowie thirsts For something good and cold. Jets blink across the sky Like migratory souls. 3. Bowie is among us. Right here In New York City. In a baseball cap And expensive jeans. Ducking into A deli. Flashing all those teeth At the doorman on his way back up. Or he’s hailing a taxi on Lafayette As the sky clouds over at dusk. He’s in no rush. Doesn’t feel The way you’d think he feels. Doesn’t strut or gloat. Tells jokes. I’ve lived here all these years And never seen him. Like not knowing A comet from a shooting star. But I’ll bet he burns bright, Dragging a tail of white-hot matter The way some of us track tissue Back from the toilet stall. He’s got The whole world under his foot, And we are small alongside, Though there are occasions When a man his size can meet Your eyes for just a blip of time And send a thought like SHINE SHINE SHINE SHINE SHINE Straight to your mind. Bowie, I want to believe you. Want to feel Your will like the wind before rain. The kind everything simply obeys, Swept up in that hypnotic dance As if something with the power to do so Had looked its way and said: Go ahead.

Drawn in outer space on a ceiling of night, a hinged balance held true. That balance —its mechanisms worked into the unknown— emerged in the star systems which turn in union without history as we know it on this planet. I recognize it to the East said I to the West, not made, not given, over the world. Devoted observers, it seems to me a just structure. John 1:5 And my search for peace underground now come to an end —constraints accepted in spirit as well as in letter, the line spent, the theatres in abandon— I viewed the balances more clearly than ever before.

You little stars that live in skies And glory in Apollo’s glory, In whose aspècts conjoinèd lies The heaven’s will and nature’s story, Joy to be likened to those eyes, Which eyes make all eyes glad or sorry; For when you force thoughts from above, These overrule your force by love. And thou, O Love, which in these eyes Hast married Reason with Affection, And made them saints of Beauty’s skies, Where joys are shadows of perfection, Lend me thy wings that I may rise Up, not by worth, but thy election; For I have vowed in strangest fashion To love and never seek compassion.

Lynette, the stars are kerned so far apart— Through a herniated zodiac I almost see your waled skylanes, your shocked Capricorn and Cancer. In the hundred and two years since you were born, and the sixteen since your heart failed, and the nearly sixty since you gave up poetry, it seems we can’t navigate by the same star chart. I’d like to think we were fated to work the same coracle: you steering with one hand, grasping your corner of the seine while I grasp mine; together sweeping the weirs. Lynette saw the sky made wide-waled corduroy by the flight paths of fighter jets. Corde du roi—“Cloth of the king.” (“A baseless assertion,” states the oed .) A fireman from the Midlands nfs said the raids on Swansea were worse than on Birmingham, where a ten-year-old Roy Fisher gaped at the garden where his cousins were slaughtered, and later wrote,It was like a burst pod filled with clay. Last night, Lynette, my son thought he saw his father in the jumbo jet roaring over Cherryhurst: the weather softer, flight paths altered. Three weeks now his father gone. • Insofar as Moses came to in a coracle, it wasn’t a Welsh one-off; it wasn’t a hapax of vessels. Insofar as it’s kind of a kiddie boat, not a kayak, not the royal barge the Makah sent William Blake, aka Johnny Depp, with into the northern Pacific; not even the Viking ship, its carved prow like an uncial; insofar as it is calico wrapped up in tar, insofar as it is swaddled willow whippets. • “Pastoral ding-dong is out ,” Lynette wrote, and no wonder— bombs hidden on the glossy knolls. In the sorrel. In the tormentil. I thought she was perhaps the closest I could get to my grandmother. While Lynette was writing “Displaced Persons”— Neither from the frosted leaf nor from The grey hard ground could they find Relief

1    I gaze through a telescope at the Orion Nebula, a blue vapor with a cluster of white stars, gaze at the globular cluster in Hercules, needle and pinpoint lights stream into my eyes. A woman puts a baby in a plastic bag and places it in a dumpster; someone parking a car hears it cry and rescues it. Is this the little o, the earth? Deer at dusk are munching apple blossoms; a green snake glides down flowing acequia water. The night is rich with floating pollen; in the morning, we break up the soil to prepare for corn. Fossilized cotton pollen has been discovered at a site above six thousand feet. As the character yi, change, is derived from the skin of a chameleon, we are living the briefest hues on the skin of the world. I gaze at the Sombrero Galaxy between Corvus and Spica: on a night with no moon, I notice my shadow by starlight. 2    Where does matter end and space begin? blue jays eating suet; juggling three crumbled newspaper balls wrapped with duct tape; tasseling corn; the gravitational bending of light; “We're dying”; stringing a coral necklace; he drew his equations on butcher paper; vanishing in sunlight; sobbing; she folded five hundred paper cranes and placed them in a basket; sleeping in his room in a hammock; they drew a shell to represent zero; red persimmons; what is it like to catch up to light? he threw Before Completion: six in the third place, nine in the sixth. 3    A wavering line of white-faced ibises, flying up the Rio Grande, disappears. A psychic says, “Search a pawnshop for the missing ring.” Loss, a black hole. You do not intend to commit a series of blunders, but to discover in one error an empty cocoon. A weaver dumps flashlight batteries into a red-dye bath. A physicist says, “After twenty years, nothing is as I thought it would be.” You recollect watching a yellow- and-black-banded caterpillar in a jar form a chrysalis: in days the chrysalis lightened and became transparent: a monarch emerged and flexed its wings. You are startled to retrieve what you forgot: it has the crunching sound of river breakup when air is calm and very clear. 4    Beijing, 1985: a poet describes herding pigs beside a girl with a glass eye and affirms the power to dream and transform. Later, in exile, he axes his wife and hangs himself. Do the transformations of memory become the changing lines of divination? Is the continuum of a moment a red poppy blooming by a fence, or is it a woman undergoing radiation treatment who stretches out on a bed to rest and senses she is stretching out to die? At night I listen to your breathing, guess at the freckles on your arms, smell your hair at the back of your neck. Tiger lilies are budding in pots in the patio; daikon is growing deep in the garden. I see a bewildered man ask for direction, and a daikon picker points the way with a daikon. 5    He threw Duration; sunspots; what is it like to catch up to light? a collapsing vertebra; the folding wings of a blue dragonfly; receiving a fax; buffeted on a floatplane between islands; a peregrine falcon making a slow circle with outstretched wings; he crumpled papers, threw them on the floor, called it City of Bums; polar aligning; inhaling the smell of her hair; a red handprint on a sandstone wall; digging up ginseng; carding wool; where does matter end and space begin? 6    Mushroom hunting at the ski basin, I spot a blood-red amanita pushing up under fir, find a white-gilled Man On Horseback, notice dirt breaking and carefully unearth a cluster of gold chanterelles. I stop and gaze at yellow light in a clearing. As grief dissolves and the mind begins to clear, an s twist begins to loosen the z twisted fiber. A spider asleep under a geranium leaf may rest a leg on the radial string of a web, but cool nights are pushing nasturtiums to bloom. An eggplant deepens in hue and drops to the ground. Yellow specks of dust float in the clearing; in memory, a series of synchronous spaces. As a cotton fiber burns in an s twist and unravels the z twist of its existence, the mind unravels and ravels a wave of light, persimmons ripening on leafless trees.

O Hesper-Phosphor, far away Shining, the first, the last white star, Hear’st thou the strange, the ghostly cry, That moan of an ancient agony From purple forest to golden sky Shivering over the breathless bay? It is not the wind that wakes with the day; For see, the gulls that wheel and call, Beyond the tumbling white-topped bar, Catching the sun-dawn on their wings, Like snow-flakes or like rose-leaves fall, Flutter and fall in airy rings; And drift, like lilies ruffling into blossom Upon a golden lake’s unwrinkled bosom. Are not the forest’s deep-lashed fringes wet With tears? Is not the voice of all regret Breaking out of the dark earth’s heart? She too, she too, has loved and lost; and we— We that remember our lost Arcady, Have we not known, we too, The primal greenwood’s arch of blue, The radiant clouds at sunrise curled Around the brows of the golden world; The marble temples, washed with dew, To which with rosy limbs aflame The violet-eyed Thalassian came, Came pitiless, only to display How soon the youthful splendour dies away; Came, only to depart Laughing across the gray-grown bitter sea? For each man’s life is earth’s epitome, And though the years bring more than aught they take, Yet might his heart and hers well break Remembering how one prayer must still be vain, How one fair hope is dead, One passion quenched, one glory fled, With those first loves that never come again. How many, how many generations, Have heard that sigh in the dawn, When the dark earth yearns to the unforgotten nations And the old loves withdrawn, Old loves, old lovers, wonderful and unnumbered As waves on the wine-dark sea, ’Neath the tall white towers of Troy and the temples that slumbered; In Thessaly? From the beautiful palaces, from the miraculous portals, The swift white feet are flown! They were taintless of dust, the proud, the peerless Immortals As they sped to their loftier throne! Perchance they are there, earth dreams, on the shores of Hesper, Her rosy-bosomed Hours, Listening the wild fresh forest’s enchanted whisper, Crowned with its new strange flowers; Listening the great new ocean’s triumphant thunder On the stainless unknown shore, While that perilous queen of the world’s delight and wonder Comes white from the foam once more. When the mists divide with the dawn o’er those glittering waters, Do they gaze over unoared seas— Naiad and nymph and the woodland’s rose-crowned daughters And the Oceanides? Do they sing together, perchance, in that diamond splendour, That world of dawn and dew, With eyelids twitching to tears and with eyes grown tender, The sweet old songs they knew, The songs of Greece? Ah, with harp-strings mute do they falter As the earth like a small star pales? When the heroes launch their ship by the smoking altar Does a memory lure their sails? Far, far away, do their hearts resume the story That never on earth was told, When all those urgent oars on the waste of glory Cast up its gold? Are not the forest fringes wet With tears? Is not the voice of all regret Breaking out of the dark earth’s heart? She too, she too, has loved and lost; and though She turned last night in disdain Away from the sunset-embers, From her soul she can never depart; She can never depart from her pain. Vainly she strives to forget; Beautiful in her woe, She awakes in the dawn and remembers.

In the middle of rolling grasslands, away from lights, a moonless night untethers its wild polka-dots, the formations we can name competing for attention in a twinkling and crowded sky-bowl. Out from the corners, our eyes detect a maverick meteor, a transient streak, and lying back toward midnight on the heft of car hood, all conversation blunted, we are at once unnerved and somehow restored. Out here, a furrow of spring-fed river threads through ranches in the tens of thousands of acres. Like cattle, we are powerless, by instinct can see why early people trembled and deliberated the heavens. Off in the distance those cattle make themselves known, a bird song moves singular across the horizon. Not yet 2:00, and bits of comet dust, the Perseids, startle and skim the atmosphere like skipping stones. In the leaden dark, we are utterly alone. As I rub the ridges on the back of your hand, our love for all things warm and pulsing crescendos toward dawn: this timeless awe, your breath floating with mine upward into the stars.

The stars last night were very clear which happens after rain i stood in the wet grass and looked up for longer than i meant to some looking is not about seeing it's about the looking itself

I set an alarm for 3am for the meteor shower saw eleven of them in twenty minutes made eleven wishes which is probably too many wishes for one night but the sky was offering and i took them