From Star to Star

It isn’t that I am trying to defend myself
from a lie. Or from something I hadn’t
experienced before. Nights I follow myself
savoring the humid dark nettled
with the inflamed mango blossoms of February,
hardened by the unreal silence of the trees.
The memory of a soft-spoken Japanese girl
comes to me, wiping away the deep irrational
grieving for my long-suffering father.
A doubting, a part of myself going away
to some place I could not guess at now.
Par far beyond childhood which did not exist.
These nights are all the same, saying nothing,
holding the silence out in their frantic-looking stars.
Time is a green mango. In one, there,
keeping its distance. Asleep, I know
it never mattered, stars just floated
in the void of things, of poetry and dream,
pale against the sun, against memory
and the ribs of breath.
It isn’t that I awake trembling from time,
ashamed of the way the quarantine of my life
terrified me. In the night,
the stars of loose feeling sputter,
burning for an answer. I walk
past the endless echoes of footfalls, bravely,
the Milky Way huddled in the path
like the beaten, the destitute and the sick;
and beyond, the light lay breathing
on the mangoes, the way I dreamed once,
softness and reverence
against the high, brilliant flanks.