To me, he was giant;
his huge hands were cracked, but smooth,
and he caught things with them,
occasionally a leaf, but mostly tears.
He was very sad being so close to the clouds,

and so far from the rest of us.

We would walk together, sometimes long
into the night, and we would look up always.
We would leave from his enormous house,
and he would say, “I want to watch meteors fall,”
and I would smile up at him, and he up at the stars,
which simply refused to come down.

As that summer waned and his tree trunk neck
grew weary from the angle at which he forced it
to carry his pumpkin-sized head, I asked him if ever
he had seen a shooting star, and he said sadly,
“No.”
So we went on walking,
and the air made us pull on coats,
and his neck was crooked,
and the stars were static.