I count the distance as you count the stars, before me
mile-markers that glow in headlights, then you, mapping out
an ink-blot universe with only sparkling dustmites of potential doorways,
carried high by a Raven’s crooked wing, the same Raven who has swallowed
the moon tonight. Yet the constellations keep you company. Strange, that
you somehow, strangely, miss me. And somehow, strangely,
I think I am almost capable of feeling the same.
I hold my hand-stitched Indian doll to my chest the way I did
when I was little, when I did not know my ancestors were imaged of this
simple-made plaything of eyes of black crescent-moons and minute mouths,
that they followed stars the way you do, the Mother Bear and her playful Cub,
and the North-faced star that’s ever spangled the sky.
I follow the road of an asphalt sort, one that guides me a single direction,
while you lay on your back and contemplate the corkscrewed spaces and pathways
through the milky way, a puddly mess of liquid stars that pools through your open eyes.
The nebulas swim like salmon, reflecting a multitude of ingenious colors contorted by
lackluster scientific interpretation.
And as I count the distance, you counting stars, I note
the melancholy likelihood of seeing you again while you perceive the
chances that we have to obtain this dream. And I look out into the night, the sky
as dark as my doll’s ebony horsehair, see the wandering Ursus Major and spear-tip
of Orion’s arrow, their directions indecipherable to me and yet to you a sign, a million signs,
that there is order to the insanity, that there is more than us, much more, and yet the universe
still whispers you a promise that in all of this, we are not yet forgotten.
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