The Astronaut & The Poet, and: The Poet Sees a Partial Eclipse, The Astronaut Feels Hail
- The Astronaut & The Poet, and: The Poet Sees a Partial Eclipse, The Astronaut Feels Hail
The Astronaut & The Poet
refuse to call what they have a long-distance relationship. From a backyard hammock
she doesn’t so much watch the robin’s breast burn its trail of rust through the sky
between them as dreams it a lake, mid-tide, towing light between each of their shores.
She’s given herself to twenty-two hours of sleep a day, letting go of gravity & holding her breath
underwater because he’s the only man who’s looked straight at her face without staying. He learned
early the fastest way to escape a plane sinking into a sea, has seen Earth unscroll its jigsaw topography,
could never forget their planet’s curve & her, from such a height—dust at the bottom of a well, an island
slipping into itself, every granule of sand shoved from the top of the hourglass. Her winter
skin is snow-covered Scandinavia. Her rivulets are lakes are cloud are passing beneath a curtain [End Page 163]
of fire he’s falling through her hair doused her dress dancing her atmosphere resisting, resisting. [End Page 164]
The Poet Sees a Partial Eclipse, The Astronaut Feels Hail
Molten horseshoe hung upside down against nothing but dark & then more dark. Space, you’ll say—
distance, time. This evening, beneath some blooming tulip tree, not even the moon & sun make certain
a path to one smelted ring in the sky. Here, I know, holds a similar kind of darkness as there, all the blood
drained from the day, the sun cutting her self to crescents against flowers & leaves on this poplar, this concrete. Ache
is why I came here, Love, to a roof’s edge, witness to some celestial event, rare as looking without fear or shield, willing
to singe the small net of blood I’ve been given. Somehow, hail falls all around you, halving its white from its white. Try to believe me
when I say breathing is more than exhalation, that we’ll always take in more than we can ever give back, yet somehow we keep
growing closer together, in lesser conditions, spinning uncertain & dumb & out of time until bone is skin is air is fire. [End Page 165]
Lisa Fay Coutley is the author of In the Carnival of Breathing (Black Lawrence Press), winner of the Black River Chapbook Competition. She is the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, scholarships to the Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers’ Conferences, and an Academy of American Poets Levis Prize. Her poems appear most recently in Sou’wester, Seneca Review, Iron Horse, Third Coast, and Drunken Boat. She is a PhD candidate and poetry editor for Quarterly West at the University of Utah.
