Sodden Stars
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- Sodden Stars
In my high meadow unnaturally sweet with thymethe sharp-shin rang and small birds dove for cover, spooking
the horses and a deer who leaped the dry-stone wall. I watchedthe hunter swoop and swerve like the Hawker Hurricane
my father made and I flew, until sky erupted out of nowherecatching me off guard, blowing the killdeer off her nest.
Night was still too warm when I entered the lake carefulnot to disturb stars, steering them aside, but they followed
like lost vowels until I got to the center, if water has a center,and they drifted away over this reservoir of drowned towns
where I lay on my back, looking up at the turning worldin what my father called “the dead man’s float,” the paradox
that saved his life more than once from an oil-soakedNorth Atlantic, when out of nowhere, depth-charge, Stuka,
or torpedo hit, and I waited for the lake to take its time keepingme up above where sodden stars drifted down empty streets. [End Page 641]
Brian Swann’s most recent collection of poems is In Late Light, published by the Johns Hopkins University Press. His new collection, “St. Francis and the Flies,” won the August House Poetry Prize and will be published early next year.
