She told me she’d seen the stars collide
and collect in a spectral petri dish. She said
it was an image of the future, a vision
that had come after the rains went still
and the birds had rushed out of the East
on a hot gray wind with the voice of two
cracked violins whose notes had ceased
years ago in a hall long gone to wood dust.
I’m old, she said, and you’re much younger,
and you’ll probably believe such a thing,
that I tossed those remnants from my dish
into the sky and what you see when you fall
out of bed and stare high out your window
is fragment, echo, the skin cells of other billions,
like afternoon motes in moving room light,
falling onto water, powdering the leaves,
hardening the throats of frogs. No, he said,
listening. You say you caught the pieces
of broken stars and dashed them into the sky
so that they appear random like motes, concrete
grains in the wind, a billion lives that once
watched, like us, the sky, reading messages,
shapes, the future, and so we meet at a distance,
and our joining is like water mixing life with death.
