Stedfast

Would I were stedfast

In beloved darkness,
surfeited with arrows,

I wheel, unfixed.
Be outside your human

smallness, the stars
want to tell us.

But the night just pours
with the same-old stories.

My little who-did-what-
to-whom memorial.

Stedfast

In a pouty bout
of astral projection

I have done the manly thing
and hunted you into the stars.

But perhaps your mythical
creature is really hydrophytic

with scientific internal
luggage capable of

submerging, emerging
and floating. I espouse you

for Captain of Living Waters.
To replace the old candidate

who makes one fear
one’s own body-mind

like a hometown.
Let me get behind you.

Let’s don the jerseys
for our new team with a flash

of toplessness for everyone.
The blue window

of sadness might lighten,
but don’t worry.

About your mortal love.
You don’t have to forget.

Flowers remain
of your tears.

Though your reverence
is not for the Ovidian joke

of transformation, like mine is.
You revere movement.

The streamflow wands
its yellow glowstick

along life’s tenebrous surface
and you are recording.

The export is memory alone.
Nothing to cause further study

in the anthropology of discard
by outlasting you. Nothing to join

the piles on earth, the gyres
in the heavens and seas.

All this bright overlapping
of matter, energy and interpretation.

These nouns, verbs, adjectives.
I was once drunkenly controlled

by the adverb but now I know:
one moves. I will not say how,

because you are the mystic
of your own how.

Among all this pretty subsisting,
who could know the secret plan?

We are all just momentary
temperature-whences.

With our sibylline sets
of ancestral instructions.