“There’s my sky,” my father says. I don’t know
what he expects, answer, in his driveway,
“It’s clear, all right,” and idling in neutral,
Think he’s planning to tell me the ancient
Names for the dots or the tales they fathered,
People who suffered, changed, and ascended
While somebody handed their stories down.
Two dippers and Orion—I forget
The rest or never learned or failed to see
Anything but the stars scattered on our scale
Of pulse and breath. I want him to show me
Archer, bear, lion; I want marble busts
Of myth to form above us like pillars
Of flame, chariots of fire, accounting
For every light, and because my mother
Has died, wonder if he means to show me
Where she is, how one cluster has reformed
To suggest a melodrama of hope.
Heavy-headed with travel, I wait while
The time-released light, set to eleven,
Blinks off in his living room like stars near
The horizon tumbling off the sky’s screen.
And I remember no clock in this house
Is correct, all six set so fast no one
Would believe them, early as wet robins
In today’s false thaw of February.
We stand with the night in our lungs; we breathe
A sentence of silence until he says,
“Venus and Jupiter,” directs me low
In the sky where I see so many lights
I can nod, certain they are among them.