i always knew what it was to wish upon a star, a star
old and ramshackled and grey, a star
ready in any eternal minute to sizzle into vast, black space so still,
a star waiting to seize to shine upon its fellow universe, knowing
even that itself, so bright, would eventually slip away – knowing even
it, in time, would seize to burn, senescence sinking into silent perpetuity:
a nothing so big it becomes at once the something beyond all things
(and so believe in it, and hold it close – every inch of life’s matter mattering all the more).
please let me tell you, now, dear, how i love the passing of time:
how i love the callow shine of a day too young to define
the niches in its mountains as anything but shadow,
as anything but what light once was and will become, as one, again.
(we can always count on it, yes! we must always hold on to amaranthine
revolutions of starlight and sun – to the dark, indeterminate togetherness of the universe as one.)
and how i love each day as it rusts into one of hundreds of tarnished sunsets!
(this sunset only simply a single star swimming in silvered skies
over our planet of peace and plants and a promising pack of people
who are at times problematic but only all so puzzled and new, in that.)
and how i love the nights which these sunsets beget
(nights ever pregnant with tomorrow, who is only a twinkle in moon’s eye)
as we bob around, unprotected as specks of dust, particles persisting
from vacant bus stop benches to parking lots to some other person’s poems,
swathed in the pure promise of the next day and what it might bring,
or what we might bring to it and to another person, perhaps
(because those matterless measures of heart are all that matter, perhaps.)
and how, of all the lonely poets
(though not all of us are)
your words free mine up from shackled secrecy, from a shivering mind(mother), (me)
(a me who almost forgot that dark means only to wait,
and how many of us, waiting) from their womb or tomb of time, all mine -
(and yours)
and how i love though every star upon which i wish is hit or (hopeful) miss,
the things we share with rigor and rhyme persist,
and we’ll never stick ever to hurtful heartsick; we are never long alone:
and our words (wont ever to know or be known)
— of woe, gentle wisdom, or the bliss of being bare,
tattoo our souls: stirred, sleepless, unscared —
our words who’ll always and in every way roam,
they herd us all the ways and every day home.
