Where The Universe Unfolds You


When he told me about the nights
spent sitting on a bluff overlooking
a valley, and how the stars were so close
to you, you felt they were simply part
of who you were, this two weeks
after her death, him crying and begging
to have one more night to sit there
on that bluff in Montana, sit there with his
dark-haired, brown-eyed woman, his feisty
tell you to go-to-hell in a heartbeat woman,
his wife of twenty years soon to be placed
in the ground, I cried too. For losing her,
the one who loved me best, for not knowing
what it would be like to have the stars
become intimate friends, for not knowing how I
would navigate through my dark nights
alone, for not being there when she fell
into the sleep she never woke from, for loving
so much too late, for not telling her
how many times she pissed me off and for
how grateful I was she did: She now eight
years in that cemetery with the stone
he and I chose as he wept, as I became
like marble, like granite, like the rock
I thought I could be for him: He whose
calls I never answer, he who has remarried,
he who spends his days mending the damage
of nature's whims, out there on rooftops,
out there sometimes late at night, where
it seems, I am sure, that the stars remember
him: a young man in love, his wild woman baying.