She’s falling in love with a boy named after a star.
I say, “How poetic.”
She says, “I’m not sure how to love a star.
I’ve never done this before.”

I don’t tell her about the star I spent all of last summer staring at.
The star that glowed so brilliantly
that I forgot about the pain in my neck
from gazing upwards for a whole season.
I forgot that I was in a land of meteor showers.
I convinced myself of a rearranged solar system.

I don’t tell the girl about to jump about the fall.
The Fall when I fell and fell and kept wondering when I would hit the ground.
The winter when I had nowhere else to go and my heart felt
like it was constantly hitting rock bottom and bouncing back up,
only to crash down again with greater force.
People who listen closely enough say they can still hear echoes
of my heart breaking every time I look up to the night sky.

Natalie, she’s always had her head in the clouds.
She swallows zodiac signs without any salt.
She feels safest on the outer edges of the Milky Way.
I don’t want her to think I am afraid of the sky.
I almost show her my scars-
Deep blue nebulae on the bottoms of my feet
from when I tried to run her out of me;
Black holes eclipsing missing memories
from when I tried to smoke her out of me;
Constellations of twisted veins in my hands
from when I tried to write her out of me.
It still isn’t quite working.

But I promise, I’m not afraid of the sky.
I’m just afraid of leaping
into an atmosphere with
too little oxygen or too much gravity.
Everything in moderation, I think to myself.
Stop searching for telescopes
that will kiss your eyelids.
They measure success
in how far away they can get.
Even some of the most intimate cosmic embraces
can start to feel like long-distance light-years
before you ever thought possible.

The best way to see a star
is to look right beside it
and let it soak into your peripheral vision.
Do not let your pupils become too attached to the darkness.

Finally, I sigh and tell her,
“I have no map of the galaxy.
I might have, at one point, been able to draw you one,
but I always leave too soon.
I still can’t sleep since realizing
that stars burn out long before
we ever see their light.”

My Mistress' Eyes Are Everything Beneath The Moon;
The crimsom of her lip is as the shade of blood;
If coal is black, why then her thighs are cream;
If skin be burlap, white silk is her body.
You have never seen masked daisys, black and blue
But she creates blooming poppies on my cheeks,
And no perfume upon the earth compares to her scent
The exhalation of my mistress is as jasmine and honeysuckle.
I hate when she is silent, yet well she thinks,
All other sound is dissonant compared to her voice.
A godess I first saw, as she passed me;
My mistress levitates and glides across the air.
    All the horrors of hell, are fine, if her memory remains in my mind.
Her magnificence is selfevident, with words beyond compare.

THAT crazed girl improvising her music.
Her poetry, dancing upon the shore,

Her soul in division from itself
Climbing, falling She knew not where,
Hiding amid the cargo of a steamship,
Her knee-cap broken, that girl I declare
A beautiful lofty thing, or a thing
Heroically lost, heroically found.

No matter what disaster occurred
She stood in desperate music wound,
Wound, wound, and she made in her triumph
Where the bales and the baskets lay
No common intelligible sound
But sang, "O sea-starved, hungry sea.'

Knee length skirt, cotton cami,
lace shrug, and heels.
All black.
Fair skin, blonde hair, blue eyes. Very pretty.
My children edge past her, past the Other Women,
on their way to the park.
Son takes a second look, then hurries on. Vans squeak
through sodden grass.
Baggy jeans soak up puddles of mud.
Typical twelve-year-old boy.

They return,
plastered in cut-grass, flushed-pink and grinning.
Daughter cradles the ball, and
crows about winning, while
The Pretty One, the Other Women,
alternate tuts with
oh-what-it-is-to-be-youngs
…
but The Pretty One,
she's only
twelve.