1

One summer night, walking from our house after dinner, stars make the sky almost white.

My awe is like blindness; wonder exchanges for sight.

Star-by-star comprises a multiplicity like thought, but quiet, too dense for any dark planet between.

While single stars are a feature of the horizon at dusk, caught at the edge of the net of gems.

Transparence hanging on its outer connectedness casts occurrence as accretion, filling in, of extravagant, euphoric blooming.

Then, being as spirit and in matter is known, here to there.

I go home and tell my children to come out and look.

The souls of my two children fly up like little birds into branches of the Milky Way,  
chatting with each other, naming constellations, comparing crystals and fire.

They exclaim at similarities between what they see in the sky and on our land.

So, by wonder, they strengthen correspondence between sky and home.

Earth is made from this alchemy of all children, human and animal, combined 
with our deep gratitude. 

2

I see his dark shape, moving and shifting against night’s screen of stars.

My little girl reaches for his lighted silhouette.

Human beings are thought upward and flown through by bright birds.

We believe stars are spirits of very high frequency.

We feel proud our animals come from stars so dense in meaning close to sacrament.

We describe time passing in stories about animals; star movement is named for seasonal migrations of deer, wolf, hummingbird, dolphin, and as animals stars walk among us.

Our snake Olivia, for example, tells me there’s no conflict between humans and rain, because resource is all around us.

A coyote loved night, and he loved to gaze at the stars.

“I noticed one star in Cassiopeia; I talked to her, and each night she grew brighter and closer, and she came to life here, as a corn snake, my friend.”

“She looks like a dancer on tiptoe, stepping around pink star-blossoms surging up after rain.”

3

Constellations are experienced emotionally as this play of self through plant and animal symbols and values.

A dream atmosphere flows; everything represented is sacred; being moves in accord, not of time.

Returning from the Milky Way, she realized crystals had fallen from her bag and looked up.

My story links a journey to sky with the creation of stars, in which place accommodates becoming.

Chama River flows north-south to the horizon, then straight up through the Milky Way, like water moving beneath a riverbed that’s dry.        

Abiquiu Mountain, El Rito Creek, coyote, snake, rainbow and rain, spider and hummingbird identify equivalent spiritual placements above, so wherever we go, there is company, nurture, from every star in our regard.

4

I start up to ask my birds to return home, and find our land continuous with a starry sky mapped as entities who set into motion occurrence, here.

Place awaits an imprint from this potential, even though starlight arriving now already happened; what happens is a depth of field, before and after drought, fire, storm disruption.

I move at high speed, but I’m still standing beside my house in the dark. 

To go there, I find the place on our mesa that correlates to their tree in the sky and leap up.

Space stirs as star trilliums emerge through darkness like humus.

I ask one blossom to please in the future renew these bonds between sky and my children, so they will always hold light in the minerals of their eyes.

5

Sun on its nightly underground journey weaves a black thread between white days on the cosmic loom, cord or resonance between new experience and meaning.

The origin of stars expresses the underlying warp of this fabric; summer solstice draws a diagonal across my floor, precession, weaving ground of informing spirit, so therefore, life is fundamental to stars.

The reverse is well known.

That’s why I don’t use a telescope, star charts or glasses when I go out; I think of a place; I wait, then fly to my children.

When the star-gate is raised, there’s a narrow door between sky and ground.

But when I arrive, I find the sky solid; I can’t break through to visit my starbirds and stand there wondering, before dawn.

Then sky vault lifts; maybe I can slip through to find the Milky Way and see its blossoms.

Then our sun appears in the crack and pushes through to the day.

It’s so bright, so hot, I step back and cover my eyes; I hear my mother calling.

^{(after Stephen Hawking)}

Do you sometimes want to wake up to the singularity
we once were?

so compact nobody
needed a bed, or food or money—

nobody hiding in the school bathroom
or home alone

pulling open the drawer
where the pills are kept.

For every atom belonging to me as good
Belongs to you.   Remember?
There was no   Nature.    No
 them.   No tests
to determine if the elephant
grieves her calf    or if

the coral reef feels pain.    Trashed
oceans don’t speak English or Farsi or French;

would that we could wake up   to what we were
—when we were ocean    and before that
to when sky was earth, and animal was energy, and rock was
liquid and stars were space and space was not

at all—nothing

before we came to believe humans were so important
before this awful loneliness.

Can molecules recall it?
what once was?    before anything happened?

No I, no We, no one. No was
No verb      no noun
only a tiny tiny dot brimming with

is is is is is

All   everything   home

’s weird if you stare at it and I’m staring
at the travel graph of the Voyager craft—
the one that sailed past all our planets

taking the pictures I’ve framed of Jupiter’s
big red eye, ice geysers on Enceladus
and the spooky blue of Neptune.

A while back I emailed the childhood friend
who became a past life regressionist.
She told me life began on a distant moon

which made life seem kind of middling, to me—
side-shelved and orbiting around
whatever the real real thing might be.

One time late at night on a golf course
we kissed and she said it wasn’t right.
I still wonder specifically why. 

She replied to say a good way to go insane
is to constantly ask what’s wrong with yourself
and expect someone to answer.

She also said I thought you died
and all week I wondered if it might be true.
I’ve heard reality’s a function

of expectation, so my problem
stems from my prospect: I seem to be
clinging to the idea of a satellite

way out in the frozen night
beeping news from the motherland.
Like my own aging mother

sending clippings about potato blight,
poisonous spiders, New
Zealand’s musical theater scene,
 
and the township’s announcement
that the golf course has been sold
to an investment group out of Manitoba.

Just tell me: was it the mosquitos?
Were my lips dry or ineffective in some way?

Beep…  Beep…

                             I was just saying hello.

Beep…  Beep…

                            but I guess I would like to know…

                                       after Sam Lipsyte

The first Space Shuttle launch got delayed until
Sunday, so we had to watch the Shuttle’s return
to Earth in class instead—PS113’s paunchy black
& white rolled in, the antennae on top adjusted
sideways & down for better reception. That same
day, Garrett stole my new pencil box. That same
day, Cynthia peed her jeans instead of going
to the bathroom & letting Garrett steal her pencil
box. Both of us too upset to answer questions about
space flight, so we get sent to the back of the class.
I smelled like the kind of shame that starts a fight
on a Tuesday afternoon. Cynthia smelled like pee
& every-day Jordache. The shuttle made its slick way
back to Earth, peeling clouds from the monochromatic
sky & we all—even the astronomically marginal—
were winners. American, because a few days before,
a failed songwriter put a bullet in the President
in the name of Jodie Foster. The shuttle looked
like a bullet, only with wings & a cockpit, & when
it finally landed, the class broke into applause
& the teacher snatched a thinning American flag
from the corner, waved it back & forth in honor
of our wounded President & those astronauts.

A Schwinn-ride away: Eagledale Plaza. Busted shopping
strip of old walkways, crooked parking spaces nicked
like the lines on the sides of somebody’s mom-barbered
head. Anchored by the Piccadilly Disco, where a shootout
was guaranteed every weekend, coughing stars shot from
sideways guns shiny enough to light the way for anyone
willing to keep a head up long enough to see. Not me.
I bought the Star Map Shirt for 15¢ at the Value Village
next to the Piccadilly. The shirt was polyester with flyaway
collars, outlined in the forgotten astronomies of disco.
The shirt’s washed-out points of light: arranged in horse
& hero shapes & I rocked it in places neither horse nor hero
hung out. Polyester is made from Polyethylene & catches
fire easily like wings near a thrift store sun. Polyethylene,
used in shampoo bottles, gun cases, & those grocery sacks
skidding like upended stars across the parking lot. There
are more kinds of stars in this universe than salt granules
on drive-thru fries. Too many stars, lessening & swelling
with each pedal pump away from the Value Village
as the electric billboard above spotlights first one DUI
attorney, then another who speaks Spanish so the sky
is constantly chattering, like the biggest disco ball ever.