Stars, Like Souls 


When I was a child, my father made 
sense of it. Orion tilted at his fingertips, 
and he rocked Cassiopeia’s chair with 

hands so big I thought he would hold 
me and all the stars forever. But stars, 
like souls, step out of their bodies – 
light more than light. 

Tonight, frost burns the marigolds. A 
last bird sings. I sit at my table and turn 
a spoon sticky with sugar over and over 

in my hands until my fingers shine the 
way my father’s did in that neighborhood 
of stars, that world I believed was the 
world without end.





Survivor


A jay on the fence preaches to a 
squirrel. I watch the squirrel quiver, 
the way squirrels do – its whole 
body flickers. I’m not sure why this 
reminds me of when I was five and 

something died in our drain spout. 
Feather or fur, I watched my father 
dig it out, knowing (as a child knows) 
how much life matters. I have seen how 
easily autumn shakes the yellow leaves,

how winter razes the shoals of heaven. 
I have felt love’s thunder and moan, and 
had my night on the wild river. I have
heard the cancer diagnosis with my name
in it. I know what mercy is and isn’t. 

Morning breaks from sparrows’ wings 
(life’s breezy business), and I’m still here,
still in love with the sorrows, the joys – 
days like this, measured by memory, the 
ticking crickets, the pulse in my wrist.   





Of Other


It isn’t now or this patch of blue autumn, 
light skimmed like milk without substance 
(its ghost on my lips). Or the way trees darken

before the sky, the way light slants through 
pines (my neighbor’s lamp or the moon). 
It’s not the way night feels when I walk in

March, when snow melts into mud, and I 
smell grass again; when I know, without seeing, 
that tight buds open high in the branches. It’s

not the expected order of things but moments of 
other (when something startles you into knowing 
something other), and the heaviness lifts inside you.

Tonight, wind pulled leaves from the sky 
to my feet and, suddenly (without warning) a 
deer leapt from the thicket behind me – leapt

and disappeared – past me as I passed myself, 
my body filled with absence, with air, 
a perfect mold of the light gone through it.





Of Feathers, Of Flight

   … if I look up into the heavens I think that it will all come right …
      and that peace and tranquility will return again.    -Anne Frank


That spring, a baby jay fell from its nest, 
and we took it to Mrs. Levine, who told 
us the mother would know our hands and 
never take it back. Spring that year was a 

cardboard box, cries for eyedropper food – 
feather-stalks stretched into wings. We 
knew, of course, that we couldn’t keep it. 
(Later, we would mark the spot with stones 

and twigs – where the bird fell, where we 
let it go – and sometimes, stopped in the 
middle of play, would point and say, there,
right there.) The day we freed it, it beat, a 

heart-clock (wound and sprung in Ruth 
Levine’s old hand) that, finally, finding 
the sky, flew higher than all the briars 
strung like metal barbs above the fence – 

a speck of updraft ash and gone. Heaven, 
fuller then for one small bird, spread its 
blue wing over us and the tree and Mrs. 
Levine who, breathing deeply, raised her

numbered arm to the light and moved her 
thumb over each fingertip as if she could 
feel to the ends of her skin the miracle 
edge of freedom, of feathers, of flight.