While the world was sleeping

Once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk this earth with your eyes turned skyward. For there you have been, and there you will always long to return. —Anonymous

I waited eons for that one winter night
when the earth tilts away from the sky.
The moon frozen to the edge of the ground,
spilling quicksilver across the snow,
each exhale frosting the telescope glass.

The planet had fallen silent for once,
forests finding pause from their groaning,
all at rest but the ghosts playing hide-and-seek between foggy puffs of breath.

That night I watched the stars fall in cascades,
in ribbons of gold and malachite.
Lens aimed to the inky shell of the sky,
the light seeping in through cracks and pinholes.

Your little meteorite hit the snow like a stone striking water
skipping once, twice. 
The telescope was the first casualty,
brass confetti scattered in a semi-circle
where we first fell together.
 
I don’t quite remember what I named you.
Starlight or Midnight or something else that meant everything to me as a little girl.
You were always warm to the touch
feathers still ashy from bathing in sunfire
sparks dripping from your teeth like hot mercury 
matching the glow-in-the-dark star stickers on my ceiling. 
I would have called you a dragon if you weren’t so small
like a stained-glass cat with rosemary eyes. 

I hid you from my mother for months
reading in the closet by your light
dancing with the shadow puppets 
when the cracking fissures kept us from sleep. 

I never did know how to care for you
if you’d eat the spiders in the darker corners of my room.
Sometimes it seemed like you were solar powered
wings spread to catch the yolky sunlight spilling across the foot of my bed
or curled into the windowsill 
drinking the silver that filters through the raindrops peppering the glass.

You never spoke to me.
I don’t know what I would have wanted you to say.
Silent except for the occasional crackling 
like pop rocks in your mouth. 

You clung to the window like you were looking for something
whiskers trembling where the ground would shake,
watching the jars quiver on the shelves when snapping ice echoes like gunshots
waiting for them to burst open too.

And then there was the day
when we first saw each other.

The storm I thought I’d left outside
came welling up in my eyes
flooding the bathroom tile
in small
glass drops
and soaking through the carpet.

You licked my wounds like they were yours
and the burning hurt less
than the gravel in my knees. 

For a moment we shared a soul
and I began to see glimpses of what you were looking for
in the foamy edges of the sky.
It wasn’t a fear of darkness
so much as gratitude for sight.

So we hid away in our fortress
for just a lifetime or two,
safer under those quilts than behind any stone walls.
Windows closed and curtains drawn
the sky could have crumbled to powder outside
and I wouldn’t have known to get a broom. 

I never realized I was afraid to lose you—
not until I did.

Nest of scarves and stolen necklaces cold and abandoned.
Snowdrifts in my lashes
fingertips all stone
ice slicking the roads and sleet pouring over the crown of my head.
No one recognized my voice.
The sidewalk scuffed beneath my shoes
the moon tracking slow across the sky.
I still wonder if you were trying to follow it home.

When the light at last began to lick up my sleeves again
I found you staring at the sky
the soles of your feet pressed deep into the ground
like you were trying to feel the earth breathe.

Home didn’t feel like home when I brought you back
like a sweater that doesn’t fit anymore.
I can still hear you scratching at the corners of my ceiling. 

I think about where you came from when I’m trying to sleep.
How I wanted the streams to just rise and swallow us whole
to wade past the tile floors of my kitchen
and fall right through to the sky.
I wanted you to show me,
to walk across the oceans of Mars
to gather a fistful of dust and watch the eons pour between my fingers.
I wanted to escape from this patient graveyard
to let the abyss hold my hair while my body rejects the gravity we had to swallow
to feel the cold spasm in my chest when I breathe in the empty
to drown in Jupiter’s milky seas.

But summer comes slowly for the earthbound
and the trees outside just continue to fall. 
The snowmelt seeps into you like a sedative
flickering in and out as the nights grow shorter
and the heat in your chest ebbs away beneath my palm.

There isn’t enough space for you here.
I can see you laboring under the weight of the air
smothering in your own warmth. 
Your eyes are copper when you look at me
begging for answers to questions you’ll never ask.

There are many of you in the Smithsonians
the hollow, lightless remnants of your kin
tucked silent next door to the modern extinction exhibits.
Kept behind the glass in the vacuum of their bioluminescence
they float in the blacklight like cosmic jellyfish
feathers sinking 
one by one 
into the abyss. 

I wanted you to stay with me
to keep you tucked between the pages of my diary
until I am tall enough to follow you to the end of the horizon. 
But as I stand in this institution
blinking in the miasmatic blue
I can already see the rust settling in your bones
the frost creeping to the corners of your eyes
and I know I cannot keep you.

This world was never meant to carry you
and it won’t hold us much longer. 

---

We have to wait for the sun to disappear
when the last waxy drips have melted from the skyline
on a night when even the ghosts are sleeping.

Then I push open the cracked paint of my window
zipping up my jacket,
climbing out of the tangled spiderweb of my curtains
and landing rough-kneed on the pavement.

Everything on the street has changed
all the lights are violet now.
The road lines have all gone melancholy,
my galoshes turning milky yellow as I slosh through the puddles with their oil slick skins.
The bulk of my jacket hums
warm and heavy against my chest.
I could have let you dart ahead of me
watched you flit from the traffic lights to the street signs one last time
but you cling to me as though you are afraid
flinching at the echoes of the deep gulleys in the pavement
though no one is awake to see you
and I almost think you are sorry to leave me.

The rain chases us down the stairs below ground.
I have stopped to let the waterfall fill my boots
when the splashing seems to wake you.
The velvet of your nose finds the damp air
and I find my footing,
dropping from the platform to the soft crunch of gravel,
and I am walking on the moon.

I follow the rails through the dark
skipping every other cross tie
pulled along by the tremors of your heartbeat.

There in the caverns we reach the very bottom of it all
where the depths seep up from the earth’s core.
I see sunlight and burning stone
mercury and hydrogen green swirling in clouds
where the abyss pools and eddies at my feet
and I cannot breathe.
Starlight seeps through cracks in the plaster,
shades of ivory and aurora coloring my vision
sucking the warmth from the ends of my hair
and turning my insides snow. 

There on my knees by the depths of the sky
your tongue burns my skin where you lick my tears away.
But I can still taste the salt when you leave my arms
and I watch you evanesce.

---

I think I’ll always look for you.

In the flickers of half-consumed candles,
in the reflections in my windowpanes 
when the sunlight washes my face,
in the faint smell of smoke and summer-lit grass. 

And sometimes
every eon or so
on those dark nights when the snow carpets the ground
as the earth leans ever further off-balance
I will stand outside with my face tilted towards the sky,
the soles of my feet pressed deep into the earth,
listening to the stars breathe.

I know I could not keep you here.
And I know you couldn’t save me.

But if you ever fall from the sun again
and find that you are lonely for a planet full of sleeping ghosts,
please come wake me up. 

My telescope is still on the porch.