To Be Draped Across the Sky
Inside me, a night pulses—
not with absence, but with embers.
Each thought a glimmering mote
drifting slow through the dark
architecture of marrow and memory.
I carry constellations not in skin,
but behind the ribs, arranged in chords
only silence can sing.
And yet—
This body is too narrow
for what flickers behind my eyes.
The starlight jostles, flares, seeks exit.
Let me burst— not into flame,
but into fabric: filaments of self threading
the sky where no sky had been.
Let my quiet blaze unfurl outward:
an aurora learned from solitude,
a drape of everything I dared to hide.
Let lovers lie beneath it
and think it weather.
Let astronomers name its folds.
Let the sea reflect it,
unafraid to shimmer back.
For what begins in the chest
must not end there.
Every inward brilliance longs
to become covering —to become sky.
.
[Yes, I have changed it
I have been reading Poetry since 1973, and I have especially loved poems with astronomical imagery. But . . . but . . . I have rarely, in that time. ever found an "astronomical" poem as perfectly realized as this. Each line, each word in each line, positively radiates and resonates a Cosmic power that even R136a1 must envy and covet. This is a poem to bookmark on my laptop. If I wanted to show a novice poet the kind of enormous verbal power a poem can deploy, this would be the supremest and only example needed.
I am reminded of Ezra Pound's words when T. S, Eliot published The Waste Land in 1922: "About enough to make the rest of us close up shop."
StarSpared
Thanks Starward-Led, for
Thanks Starward-Led, for laying that out and inspiring some more thought through R136a1. And I hope no more shops close up as poetry comes in alll shapes and sizes.
here is poetry that doesn't always conform
galateus, arkayye, arqios,arquious, crypticbard, excalibard, wordweaver