It is not static, not one thing.
We came for the aspens, lake, the stars
And immersed our bodies in its scumbled eye,
The crater’s blue slap, the needled scepters of pine
A protection spell surrounding us
And the darkness swirling about our ankles and above
Our heads we raised to the night,
Hoping to be showered with dust
From the Pleiades,
Unafraid of the cold pearl,
The sting of leaves hosting secrets
In our skulls’ ghost canyons and trails
That somehow always lead home
When the telephone rings
And I hear my father
Has leaned back far into his chair of distressed leather
As we, too, were gazing at the wicked electromagnetic
Shooting out from nowhere
Zapping the ridges of the brain
Like a sudden storm of split constellations,
Dead memories and drink.

So hard was this coming meteor,
He bit his tongue nearly off
And lapsed into a shadow of himself
Where my mother found him,
Running in to the breathless rattle, his head
Jolted back and tilted on its axis,
Mouth agape and quietly gasping
As she pressed her open O to his
And joined their planets for a moment, crossing,
Collapsing into a sputtering vacuum
Of violent seconds
Lunar hours,
Galactic decades sucked and stalling,
Expanding and contracting like a nova
To a nebula of red alarm,
A blinding point of unstable giants—oxygen and gas—
The anointing molecules,
A cross of ash
And chrism of lips
I can press to my forehead, now, imagining it.

And—Isn’t that a kind of joy,
When you hold it
To your mind like that?
That sad, beautiful star
Falling through the universe, flashing
Before it dies—bright stroke
That once spit you, human,
From its convoluted core
And lit a torch to the future
Like lovers rapturing do, licking
The lap of death, flaming
Oblivion with burst light,
A final streak, a slash
Of seed against the black
Before they disappear completely?

Michelle Bitting

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