It was at first
to see the light, immortalize its truths
as stars

mute and flat—
sun sighing over stairs,
the silvering humanity in an artist's gaze,
crumbling and daggered
as a city
profoundly unfinished—

It was at first to stand at the edge
of a sea,
the universe bared open brightly,
doubled and backwards,
blown out secrets pitted in washes of ink.

But in these moments of starlight,
space spills like truth,
a boy thighing into dark places,

folding into a warm girl
in a fallow field
beneath a spray of northern lights,
straining to see, not the
firmness of her brow or the hollow place
in her chest,
but that man-moon in the black of her eyes

hovering as a corpse.

In a fractured second's
exposure
see
not the stars, but a child running to the place
in the forest where the light falls off,
quivering awake that bit of unknowing to
something darker, something true.