Anya Kirshbaum

Forgetting the Constellations

Something in you breaks, then it
breaks down. Night someplace
—you comb the engine of stars, aching
to believe in the miraculous. Stay
in this teeming quiet place.
We know you are full to the brim
with sorrow, have watched you drop
each red bud nameless from your womb.
We know you have collected rainstorms
in soup bowls, coaxed hummingbirds
to your bed-pillow. We know
you have rolled desert rocks
onto a mountain field & asked
for milk, for grace. That still you are not
a mother. We are ourselves no strangers
to blighted bloom. Close your eyes.
We are the 10,000 pulses. Here
is the sphinx moth kissing the fireweed,
the barred owl’s croon, the bat’s funneling
swoop. Here is the night frog’s rumble
in tall reeds, the tiny acrobats troubling
the underbrush—each crawl & crackle,
each slither & wing. Let them be
our gift to you, chorus for your dismantling,
bridge you cannot see. Stop trying to hatch
a new heart from the moon.
Listen close to the trees & you will hear
all the ways to say child. A light rain,
a wind of rattling leaves, all the little animal
otherlings, each carrying our own
instrument. Stay & we will offer you
a kind of a kingdom, a kind of full
palace-golden, only real life,
yours

When We Forget

I can see through the window as you sleep,
there, into the other time
when we stood together under the great red arch
    —that muscular ribbon of twisting stone,
and your voice bellowed loud
into the open blue—
that first rooster crow.
I can see us, when we ran through the thin desert pines,
and fell, still half-children,
to the dry desert ground, as I listened
carefully, to each sound.
      Or years later, that circle of branches
we drew in silence by a river,
where I let you enter again, first
one body, then the other.
  But these years have been hard, and a bed
can be a temple or an arrow,
or a bank of white snow.  
        Beyond the basement chamber
with the door we painted gold,
hemlock bends her tip
to the starlings and the crows.
     You and I, we must choose—
bow like the trees to the north wind, stand
with all of our restlessness
towards these white mountains and hold.
Hush, long enough to remember
     how heaven was a round of cedar branches;
how one stroke on skin was enough
to make the owls shiver.

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