Blame it on the stars
I don’t mean as in astrology
and what might have been foretold
using the expansive glossary of sky.
I’ve never seen anything like it—
stars spun into a flickering mist
as if a current of light
had shattered above our heads
in molecules, lucid and gleaming.
Back on earth, our tent could almost house
your anger. Bed. Stove. Cowhide rug.
You and I and a rented waning moon.
The Sangre de Cristo Mountains,
a horizon starkly shouldered in limestone,
tucked in shadows, blue and twilight thin.
Over morning coffee, the young couple
who managed the campsite
said they had spent the night awake
on the dunes nearby, the stars so close
they’d burned in their throats like a howl.
I wondered about the potency of galaxies.
Aren’t we all made of stardust?
Lodestone to the alloys in our blood,
a stratum in our linens and bedrock.
And the couple on the dunes?
If I’d peered into their tilted faces
cupped with light, I might have seen
yours and mine.
They told us they’d witnessed a shooting star,
how it marked a beginning or an end.
Those grains of sand that had them by the ankles
were another cosmos, a cooling topography
of spilled hourglasses, and like the two of us,
a testament to what the wind can do.
I got lost that night.
I knew you wouldn’t try to find me.
I can’t even tell you how clear the stars were.
Summer constellations
—Lyra, Aquila, Pavo, Cassiopeia—
whispered in the dark like names of angels.