Stars all in line in the night. I cannot make out the Dipper,
or the regular constellations, but they are almost
in perfect rows, like the way white powerlines
look against thick-blue craggy mountains
along the roadside on a lonely traveling
2 AM, where it feels as though world is all
blurring together into some untouchable
sort of beauty. And in this moment of sky gazing,
I try not to think of how there are stars
exploding near and far all the time.
Or, how tonight my heart is like the aluminum
waiting to be placed in the vacuum chamber
for silvering, so it can see itself and know
it is alive again, even without you. But the thought
that won’t leave me still is how earlier, I listened
to symphonic music, but it was from a different world—
your world, which is the world I loved most of all.
And I looked in the snow-laced streets,
past green and red transits turning neon
the grocery and loitering crowds and white-powdery
sycamore branches, but I did not see you
because you did not live here or in any city
but in a water garden. So, I broke and bled my hand
against the icicles on the utility pole of telephone wires—
yes, numbing myself with chill but not before knowing
what it felt like where you were in the season of that year.
And not before I could feel the circuit sparks
of where your tender voice had once sailed off to—
circling within the solar wind’s polar lighting mist.