- Black Marble
Constancy? Tonight the peerless stars atonefor countless pinched & starless nights. We ride currents
of royal blue on our continental crust, safe as houses,safe in houses that perch on plains & hillsides—
or grip the sand & face the coastal tide, like seabirdsfierce into the gale. This hold—the lithic earth below
our feet—grounds & keeps us. Metamorphic rockspans down, hardly fragile, yet when sleep declines
to come, I recall the earth we've known these forty years,a waif, transformed in space—& lonelier than Lucifer mid-fall—& how
the frosted breath of clouds obscured bronze fleets of landso thin they seemed the barest scraps of hide. Or something more
like wafers of flint & splintered rock, our tiny rafts—we their castaways.
Polestar, we say, meaning one who guides us, & we navigate by stars,wish upon them, name constellations after gods
& pouty boys—& by dint of that know ourselves substantial.But this laptop's glowing portal, companion in my wakeful nights,
spins me from the photographed Blue Marble to thesenight versions, each a seeming vision of the stars, moon-arc'd
by a protective curve of light. They are not stars, but city lights.Whispered myths, human comedies winking in the black—
disobedience, sweet love affairs, heroics, all ephemeral &—That & all our quest is mirrored back. [End Page 127]
Geri Doran is the author of two books of poetry, Sanderlings (Tupelo Press, 2011) and Resin (Louisiana State University Press, 2005). A new collection, Blue Marble, is forthcoming from Tupelo Press. Her honors include the Walt Whitman Award, a Stegner Fellowship, an Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship, and residencies from the James Merrill House, Lighthouse Works, and Maison Dora Maar. She teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Oregon.