By George Dibble
In the truck-bed her face freckled with lamp-light; skin dust-red. We ate raspberries and hid
from bugs in thin raincoats.
She pointed patterns in the sky; told me:
when she was ten she hiked, was lost, hunched
beside sage which crowded a cedar on a snowed-slope; waited until
found while watching the white dots which weren’t flakes yet shone just the same suspended
against day’s black cloak.
And the night is a maze, she told me. If you want to
get out, connect the lines.
Find the pattern.
Wait.
In darkness under many nights, I have. And now
forgotten headstones forgotten park I walk between rows this mildew-stone,
whistling-wind-grass, tonight only cold enough. Who visits these
graves. Only when buried. And
now. You’d cut the sun with air—the horizon; hidden. You, this husky whispering breeze
whose voice
I know;
you. The snow will fall. Stars far that oily lake swirling only shown sometimes. Here,
alone;
heavy stillness.
In what meaning will this be
and how; you gone; a closed door
never fully. You, here, here rooted beneath this grassy floor I will look, the trees as
shadows hedged toward the moon I will; look. Its light. It shines the same
as before.
Gorgeous indolent sinking moon slacking through dark sea.
Here.
The pattern
is blackness and silence.
Header image Everything I Know About Space, by Jacob Haupt
