Noctalgia

The loss of dark skies is so painful, astronomers coined a new term for it
—headline 9/17/23

The country of my own past
seems oceans away, or just one step
under a mossy lintel into a fantasy
world I might have read in a book
held under my desk in eighth grade

before the teacher gently noted
even earnest kids like me needed
to pay attention in class. Kids like me
who weren’t rich in money—
and how much that mattered
in the ‘80s, decade of Reaganomics

and bewildering designer brands—but
were college bound on brains and family
expectation. Page 172: a girl who likes
dogs and horses better than people

walks with friends across the campus
quad, the dark wind of October
blowing their eyes bright, hopeful.
Page 378 (I read long books):
students crowd a ping-pong table,
laptop keys clicking, asking questions

before they send their fledgling words
into the ether. Page 26: a raccoon kit
reaches into the rubber boot
of a ringleted child, barn door

open behind them. Please don’t ask
about the 500s, when the protagonist’s
sister dies and her last hope for wings
withers in hard frost. I honestly don’t

want to make page 1000 with the world
as it is and my genetic inheritance
of fearful unrecognition, mind
gone awry inside a body that just

won’t die. But perhaps the next
200 pages or so could contain
some green ease, less pain, more
floating. I try to remember I can
only read one page at a time
and shouldn’t this be the one
where the once-girl is happy? I wish

for one of those weighted bookmarks
so lead-heavy they fall through
time so I can start the book again,
remembering to remember every
tender equine nose smelling of sweet
alfalfa, every sharp spark rising
into the distant, glittering sky.

This World Always Offers Reasons for Despair

war     again    in places where 
people already have     too many stones
children suffering like     the dog
I saw a man     hitting      with a metal rod
at the off-leash park     that’s usually
my haven

how can we     take care     of them?

in my own head     a wrongness     a well     
endless and raw     nothing dropped
will ever hit bottom     I am not
even sad     just lost to myself     or
rather     part of me curls     on the blue
linoleum     of my childhood kitchen
pain     boiling over on the stove

this morning    late October
the light     creeping down
sideways     as if reluctant
to touch our     earth
my legs carrying me     undirected
(automatic    like some guns)     because
my dogs must     be walked
lest they break     the peace     of the house
     
I spot     a blue jay
sky-colored     strident     far from innocent
why was that ravenous bird     made
so beautiful     I do not want     to love it

What the Insomniac Thinks

When my shoulders touch the sheets, the sleep
that had rubbed its warm fur against my ankles

while I sat on the couch after dinner
dissolves. So my mind takes up this challenge

and posits humans eating hot wings because we
want to fly, and suddenly there’s a woman chasing

moths and stuffing them in her mouth, her body
hollowing, attracting fairy dust. And do we

eat fish to belong in the cradle of water,
potatoes to know the darkness

with its roads of mycorrhizae connecting
everything? And how many of us have wondered

if fungus underlies existence, mushroom trips
showing exactly what’s real? Some time later

beings of light—clear vessels filled with magnitude—
bend over me as I garden, hold my hands

holding the trowel, as if to make sure what grows
is right and good and even magic. How else

to describe the profound strangeness that is sleep
but as a sort of magic, a compost

in which we deposit the scraps of the waking world
and hope for the nourishment we need to go on?