By: Madronna Holden
I
Someone has polished the sky--
There is a burnished track to heaven
in your eyes
And now you are the one
to speak to the night
on our behalf.
Bearing the weight
of everything left behind,
you labor through
the breath of the world.
Who would have guessed
light could be so heavy?
II
Your hand moves like
a breeze out of breath:
your leg like
the thought of a leg.
Your blood floats upward
as if your heart
were extraneous.
Only your eyes hold
something from our
shared galaxy of skin,
where we stand
with you in the wind
and the rain
Breathing
III
Astronaut of another earth--
what made you think
you could learn the
language of the stars
without vanishing
into the teeth of time?
Will it help to send you
to a more distant star?
Will it help to send you
to a dream?
You walk on moon lava
past its prime—or maybe
you’re just on a movie set
somewhere in Texas
and your moon is only
the slim silver globe
of belief in your eyes
which might slip from
your hands at any moment
and shatter
IV
So near the center
of emptiness
it is important to
do everything
properly.
Look back carefully
at your home body
in its precious coat
of skin.
Look well: your vision
stands in for each of us
who might fall toward the sky
on our trajectory of bones
our cosmos of flesh
with its solar eyes,
lunar heart,
starlit cells
in alluvial milk.
V
Astronaut
sailing a ship without a mast
to the island of fate
I hear your voice coming to us
from the day before yesterday.
Hello, Universe—
are you listening?
Can you separate
your soul or ours from
the shooting stars?
VI
It rains upward as you swim
to a coral sea under
the promised sun
steering for the reef of creation.
You ride the beating wing
of your heart as if space
were your mother blackbird
and earth her egg
in the nest of the universe.
What moves through you
and what you move through
are one and the same:
The infinite.
Madronna Holden is a folklorist, storyteller, and retired university teacher whose award-winning poetry has appeared in the anthology, Dona Nobis Pacem, as well as in American Writing, Northwest Magazine, The Christian Science Monitor, Fireweed, Green Fuse, Windfall, the Aurorean and is forthcoming in Leaping Clear. The community production of her full-length poetry drama, The Descent of Inanna, was the subject of a special aired on Oregon Public Broadcasting. She has left her teaching website (https://holdenma.wordpress.com/) online, where it continues to garner readers (currently 250,000 plus views, representing visitors from 192 countries). She is taking the occasion of her retirement to concentrate on her poetry.
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