Cry of the Stars

I woke up to the taste of coconut.
Is there anything worse
than happiness? When I was younger,
I only shook hands, a grace
I probably don't deserve. As long as we plod
eastward toward the ocean and
its tide pools, slippery kelp,
old mp3 players with Irish names,
the earth twirls, and sighs.
There’s nobody to hold anymore.
I dreamed you were in the forest,
two or three years ago, waiting to sprout
damp fungus between conversations,
and what is a mold but a tool
of self-discipline? And are we then shapes,
or echoes of shapes around us?
Yesterday I buckled down and made
up my mind. Sometimes you find yourself
on the street, not even glancing at your own
reflection as you go along.

my mother had the time to gasp
before the bowl scattered
and left its negative behind:
an old friend’s shadow, told
in the space between pieces.

The new gods still play old tricks,
but we have lost some of our wisdom.

I think maybe my ancestors knew:
gnarled carrots and lopsided smiles were just
the way of things, the warm and imperfect
voice of the earth. Nobody asked apple trees
to bear crystals, or women to bear marble—only

fools, open-mouthed, scrabbling at      

        Ellen really did it, can you believe?
        Traded her baby boy for one of the fae!
        Oh sure, he’s beautiful, but
        she hasn’t heard what happened to
        old Katherine’s second one, seventeen
        years past? Grew up a right horror, he did.

ghosts all dressed up
like the backs of their eyelids.

I think we used to know.

These days we have worn our pockets out
with asking, and our gods yield freely,

        There is a fragment of the sun
        caught in your hair, so that
        I want to weep . . .

delighted, while lethe slips under our tongues;

we reach for the same illusions now
and never stop to wonder. Our grandmothers
tried to warn us, and we laughed until

        All perfect
        All mine

we cried, jaws unhooked and gaping.
We fastened the chains with
our own hands.

I stopped

where
the dead bee
still crouched

at the puddle’s
edge

to drink

You’re drinking gingerbread tea from a paper cup
with snowmen waving at you under the rim,
and the clementine you just ate
was your fourth of the day.
Your vacuum cleaner smells like your Christmas tree.
There is a dark-green ornament hook snagged
on your fuzzy reindeer socks
and you’re looking at a jar full of colored
marshmallows that nobody is going to eat.
Your father offers you a mostly-melted
peppermint chocolate that he left in his pocket all day
(or longer, you’re not sure).
You’re wearing four blankets
so the fireplace on the TV seems almost real,
and the twinkle lights are still twinkling outside,
and you’re finding it very difficult
not to smile.

Here you are. Eighty-four staircases
and daisy chains later, and here
you are, listening again.

*

You think there is something about a kiss
that feels like a song:

you hope your children by now
have felt that too.

*

Every time you drop your glasses,
the sound of them hitting the ground
opens a door for a split second.
Through it, you can see the ropes

that pull the stars out every night,
and the puzzle pieces that fit oceans and cities
together like chords.

*

Your headphones wore out years ago.
You miss the way you used to put them on
and play with time,

the days and moments slipping under
your fingers like wet sand,
while light went on for miles in both directions.

*

You are here now, alone. Listening.
Thinking there is something about a song
that feels like a kiss.

1. the journey

I met a man on the road to the city
who asked me if I believed in love.
We were walking over ashes
that smelled like human flesh, the dust of it
getting into our shoes, and
I didn’t know what he meant.

Maybe he was talking about the way
a kid’s face lights up to see her mom.
Maybe he was talking about laughter,
the easy silence between old friends,
the soft look some people slip into
when they don’t think anyone’s watching.

But he cried and covered his face with his hands,
and I think he meant forgiveness.


2. in the dark

Last night I fell asleep with sirens
under my bed and the sound of terror
cracking in the streets.
Somehow I kept breathing
until the ceiling turned from black to gray.

Who will be the next person
to tell us it’ll be all right, to hold out promises
like cabinet medicine for our cancer,
and how long will it be
before the bandages fall apart again?

And even then, who will we have to blame?


3. lazarus

         I must remember . . .
         somewhere, there is
         a king who keeps his word.


4. the sound of his voice

We came to the dock, where they were trawling
the riverbed for rubble but kept pulling bodies
out of the mud.

A woman from the boat
stood scrubbing the silt off her arms
and she couldn’t stop shaking,
couldn’t look at the day’s haul as the muddy tarps
got carried off.

I think she remembered each face too well.
Maybe she kept finding them everywhere:
fathers like ghosts in the kitchen,
phantom kids running around the backyard
and shadows of mothers stuck in traffic.
Maybe she was afraid if she opened her eyes,
she might see herself, washed too pale
and long past drowning.

The man spoke to her the way he spoke to me.

When we left, her eyes were still closed,
but her hands were clean.


5. “do you believe in love?”

At an old gravestone we stopped.
A whole family was buried there, so long ago
the stone was washed blank of memory,
a second burial,
an extra layer of death.

But when he squatted down and his fingers
touched the cold soil—as morning
crept across the frozen earth,

I saw their names,
bright and unexpected, kept
so carefully for all this time.

They were waiting
just behind his teeth.

Speak, once-still and silent limbs,
and give our fragile language wing;
ye need not lips nor tongue to sing
the hymns of all our dreams—

and we who watch, if listening,
might find we recognize the sound
of skeletons and souls unbound.
Our hearts, uncoiling.

When I was born, my parents etched their names
into the blade of a sword and
laid it in my hands.
I carry it like a loaded gun.

My belt sags heavier as I get older, a grievous inventory:

three coiled whips from my brothers, braided and knotted up
with bookmarks, backyard twigs, tape from unwound cassettes.

two finger knives carved from pine needles and
the old safety pins my sister and I used
to write our stories intertwined.

a paper-fledged arrow stained with salamander ink,
one garrote sliced from a single guitar string,
a hand-axe made of car door hinges
and rusted train tracks.

I wish I could say my fingers never
flew to my waist, itching to draw blood,
that each aging gift is not tinged with dark traces of regret.
I wish I could say my scars don’t wear the shapes
of everything I chose to give away.

As for the sword, I am glad of its weight. I am glad
that to step without it seems strange, incomplete.

Too many mothers I’ve seen reeling,
their children’s blades sunk to the hilt,

but they don’t cry for the pain of it, they don’t seem
to notice their own bodies torn nearly in two:
they knew all along what it meant to give a child a weapon.

I only see them dazed at the fingerprints left behind,
trying to comprehend the incomprehensible—
how bewildering, how unbearable,
that someone grown so much a part of you

might drive your love
back through your heart
and walk away.

        “If you run now, without a moment’s rest…” 
         – C.S. Lewis, The Horse and His Boy

Dear baby on the bus,
your smile is as contagious as your yawn,
the way your little mouth stretches
as wide as it can go and
your binky falls out,
dimples bursting like happy fireworks
across your tiny face.

Your mother's nose is as wide and beautiful
as a mango tree; her eyelids
are round heavy stones worn smooth
by the same worry that carves mistrust into
the center of her brow.

Did you see my soft look towards the two of you?
I think she did—and frowned, unsure
how to hold a stranger's pity.
It wasn't pity.

I'm falling in love with your empty palms,
where greed and jealousy cannot yet fit,
and sorrow finds no space to perch.
Soon you'll be picking up the pieces
of a broken city, soon you'll know the weights
that cut your mother's hands—

but for now, you'll hold her scarred fingers
as if you could heal them,
as if you might break the mask she wears,
as if in one person's world, she's all that matters.
I hope she knows.

The wind above the dried stalks—
cooled air rustling, enormous breaths
coupled to my own—and the imperceptible
heartbeat of the ground were

my bound hood and cloak as I crept forward
though the narrow lines of the field:

I began to bend into myself,
to stoop and curl like a withering leaf,
knees to chin, toes to mouth,
some tenuous feeling like a tether behind
me, a quivering cord ready
to break

And then, the sky.
That vast slate awning, softly marbled and
whispering infinity.

then, endless grass in tilted planes,
the horizon’s magnetic gravity,
Eliza’s wondering murmur in my left ear
and the first long inhale that drew
my whole being upright

We had stumbled over the crying threshold.
The wind’s cold hands soothed back
our wild hair, and we gasped for freedom, aching
with sudden possibility—

I had paused in the corridor, faltering
in my crystal shoes, my gut flipping with
a cold sense of unbelonging.
The floor was lucent gold and smoother
than my young nephew’s infant cheek,
and I, whose soot-stained kneecaps creaked
with age and smudged black even
the dark, tired stones in my father’s old house,
what was I doing here?

(I dreamed of this once, long ago—
when one stepsister had first kissed her count
and the other was laughing with her duke,
I thought of the prince, yet unmarried,
and a silent dance sparkling like
stars at midnight—but he
weathered the decades alone, and
so did I.)

Again, before I turned on the curve
of the staircase, I hesitated.
My bare hand on the ivory railing trembled,
crudely wrinkled leather against
the polished white, knuckles scraped and raw
from the years’ washing.

(No gloves, she said.
I want them all to see your hands, your
scars, your callouses: this is
the honor you have earned.
She saw my girlish look, shy
beneath the creases on my weary face,
and laughed, kindly.
As for your beauty tonight, she said, beauty
is always a gift.)

The wide window, then, reached out
to me, when the blaze of chandeliers
and braziers had thrown itself into the glass and
hauled out the image of myself
breathtaking, like I had never seen,

my hair bound up in a silver crown
of moonlight, shoulders pulled back
and standing tall, free from work at last,
a long gown of silk with its deep blue
slippery beneath the roughness of my fingertips.

When I looked down at the people,
the room grew thick with a hush.
I lifted my head and found the king, rising
from his throne, and there his eyes
caught me, somehow ancient and somehow new;

he came to me through the parting crowd
and took my weathered hands in his,
warm and strong and silent—
(I thought of you
once, I said.)
—a smile split the lines on his face, and he
bowed with creaking spine, and asked
me to dance.


--
Other Princess Poems:
Snow White
Rapunzel
The Little Mermaid
Beauty and the Beast
Sleeping Beauty

If you prefer, I’ve plenty more steam rollers
tucked in my pockets, so pick one:

Smart—how nice, how
useful, how many mistakes can you make
before the long, flat stitches
of your body fall apart?

Brave—and strong, yes. This
will get you as far as your own legs
want to go, but take care.
When you’re lost in the dark, the slightest
trembling in your jaw might shatter
the narrow glass of your cookie-
cutter silhouette.

Extraordinary?
What do you think that means?
You are already—
but you think that I am wrong, that you are
only a slip of paper wide enough
for one word.

We could sit together, instead.
You could give me your hands—their
dimensional form, their lines and creases
and measured motion—and I will learn

of the mountains you’ve climbed
and the books you’ve worn out,
of the treasures you cradle and
thorns that you clutch,

you could give me your hands.
Then I would hold them tight
and tell you truth: your heart moves
life in loops and arches,
your eyes are endless seas,
and you belong

not rolled out thin on
cold pavement, but standing
on your solid feet
among the bowing hills.

Maybe we have approached the sound
of an army erupting across a cloudless sky,
the clamoring victory cry from those whose
thousand hands drew back the firmament’s curtain
and watched their king go forth,

whose voices rose like daybreak
when they looked, and wondered,
and did not understand.
As for me, I could not speak when the golden dusk
had breathed out glory that gripped me tight

like a baby’s fist around my finger,
still streaked red from the womb but steady
as the ranks of time, strong as a mother’s heartbeat,
unseemly as arms that scatter the stars yet
lift my deadweight bones like something
precious to be held.

Maybe we are approaching the sound
of true love: this low thrumming
moves the ground under me, rattles my skeleton,
shakes my soul awake and I
have glimpsed the land beyond the sun,

I have touched a face older than the ocean
that bent from light into black dust, that stooped
over my crumbling corpse and breathed—

When I heard your name, I wept
louder than the angels' shout.
They do not know the weight we carried on
our cracking necks, the long despair in heavy silence
that is splintering beneath your red-streaked feet,

which have walked from blood to blood across
the cemetery of our earth, and we,
the bones, sprang up with joy
to hear your steps at last.

The world and I dance a fine line
between glacier and wildfire, but
it's my body that sometimes flubs the tightrope.

Here I go, flipping
like a pendulum gone insane,
desperate for steady orbit,
a hot star scrabbling at one side and the
universe’s freezing hands grasping at the other.

I've grown armor made of ice: the greaves,
the cuisses, the pauldrons. I'm thinking maybe
if I tremble hard enough, I can shake
my legs and shoulders free.
My down comforter is a useless furnace and
laughs at me. The afternoon
is depressingly grey.

My down comforter is a furnace and someone
has stretched holiday plastic wrap across the sunset.
The light leaks eerily red through my window
like maraschino cherry juice, like twilight
on Mars. I am a human space heater with
a second skin made of sweat.
The covers are tangled on the floor.

Millennia ago, it seems I sped along as fast
as any spinning planet, as innately
balanced as the earth for life and
living—for summer wind and winter scarves and
children laughing on the lawn—but perhaps
I am imagining
it all.

My dreams fractalize:
Shiver. Run. The city grid.
Burn. Sit down. The sidewalk cracks.
Shiver. Swallow sand. The network of my capillaries.
The head on my neck is swelling;
it is filling with cement; it will
explode by dawn.

The year is tilting again, spilling days
like this: the steady light, the falling leaves,
the slow decrescendo of cicadas at night
and the ages-old sensation of
wrapping up the world,
days ripe for harvest, days
in quiet transition, days like this.

Out in the fields there are hay bales dreaming silently
and pumpkins stretching under vines;
beneath the highway bridge the Brandywine has dwindled
in low water and will soon swell with the autumn rain,
savoring the thrill of rushing motion before
midwinter comes to still its currents in ice.

In dark, heavy bunches, round grapes
sweeten in the high sun, waiting for workers in
dust-stained denim, in canvas gloves and
sunbrowned skin, to strip them from the trellises
and haul them to crush,

while storefronts wear glittering foliage
in manufactured colors,
cheap reflections of the glowing forests
that will be practicing their horizontal symmetry:
the trees will blossom earth and clay
into the sky, then discard drapery
altogether, a bared network
of tangling limbs both above and below,

and I will listen to the geese crying southward—
a cry for the cold wind that carries them
far from here, a cry for the withered grass
and the naked ground, for the going away
of everything in all the years
that have been lost.

Kitchen tables, soon, cradle baskets of apples
and hard-shelled winter squash, sweet potatoes
and sweet corn, the long summer’s bounty,
a rejoicing in life that in its dying
gives life again. Sour walnut-fruits will drop
blackened from the walnut tree;
bush-tailed squirrels will grow fat
within its branches.

For now, before my bones remember
how to shiver, before the dead leaves settle in
the sidewalk cracks and overflow
the storm drains, there are days like this,
my windowsill like gold every morning
and afternoons that tilt, spilling late-day light
across your face, like the sky itself
had followed where my heart would turn
and found its way home.

Just now, I bent to pick a flower;
your absence had hollowed me so thoroughly
my fingers snapped like straws.

I don’t know why you left,
why you slowly, suddenly, like a freezing
river cleaved our home in two,

I don’t—I don’t know why
or when you became who you became.
Your eyes like frosted glass

winking at the world,
your jokes like icicles thrust in my back, as if
I didn’t hear every word.

Do you remember? I think
you cannot:

In the last summer of our childhood
we pressed a rose. Its petals folded
into arches and windows
more intricate than a cathedral, tucked
safe in the heart of our favorite book

and when winter came and we
had opened it before the fire, those dry
petals looked out at us, the face
of something older than innocence

but you wrinkled your nose
and laughed. What a laugh!
It cut me open, harsh
like the northeastern wind
that grinds at the corners of our house,

all bitterness, no mirth.
Like a dead rat, you said.
You didn’t notice me bleeding.

A crow with your mother’s frown
showed me a vision of you: the cold ground
had shattered on your shoulders

and you heaved the pieces
across a colorless floor while she watched
smirking from her throne.

My clever boy, she said,
my clever darling, stay with me
forever.

You sighed tearlessly
and kept working, as if you could craft
eternity from broken earth.

A forest of umbrellas, cheerfully garish,
springs up with the receding tide like mushrooms
after a thunderstorm;
meanwhile the flock
of browning bodies sprawls sun-seared,
sleepy, over the giant mirror of the sand;
a kite wearing a sharkskin swims fluttering
through the clouds and scowls
with all his teeth.
One family with three little girls keeps
disappearing under the waves—
the lifeguard shrills angry warnings,
windmills his arm into a one-way sign
back to shore, back to shore.
The wind comes tumbling off the ocean
and snags itself in my hair and
this is almost perfect:
your laughter muffled with a cracked
conch shell, our hands wrist deep
in sea-wells and sandcastles, the burn
of happiness and salt water
singing in my throat.