THE GREEN WONDER OF JUNE, the molten hand of VENUS & "...the covenant of duskbirds..."

I don't think the SuperMoon will be our entree tonight. I'll check it again at midnight.  The sky is like thick custard--I offer you instead some dessert:  the surface of Venus and this exquisite poem by Stacie Cassarino:

The way the sky looked in Charras today

                                                                   Summer Solstice

                                               I wanted to see where beauty comes from

                                              without you in the world, hauling my heart

                                                across sixty acres of northeast meadow,

                                                      my pockets filling with flowers.

 

                                                               Then I remembered,

                                                      it’s you I miss in the brightness

                                                      and body of every living name:

                                                       rattlebox, yarrow, wild vetch.

 

                                                   You are the green wonder of June,

                                                    root and quasar, the thirst for salt.

                                            When I finally understand that people fail

                                              at love, what is left but cinquefoil, thistle,

                                                    the paper wings of the dragonfly

                                         aeroplaning the soul with a sudden blue hilarity?

                                        

                                             If I get the story right, desire is continuous,

                                                    equatorial. There is still so much

                                                    I want to know: what you believe

                                                      can never be removed from us,

                                                 what you dreamed on Walnut Street

                                            in the unanswerable dark of your childhood,

                                                      learning pleasure on your own.

                                           

                                              Tell me our story: are we impetuous,

                                          are we kind to each other, do we surrender

                                               to what the mind cannot think past?

                                               Where is the evidence I will learn

                                                          to be good at loving?

 

                                              The black dog orbits the horseshoe pond

                                             for treefrogs in their plangent emergencies.

                                                           There are violet hills,

                                               there is the covenant of duskbirds.

                                              The moon comes over the mountain

                                             like a big peach, and I want to tell you

                                            what I couldn’t say the night we rushed

                                       North, how I love the seriousness of your fingers

                                                  and the way you go into yourself,

                                                  calling my half-name like a secret.

 

                                               I stand between taproot and treespire.

                                                        Here is the compass rose

                                                      to help me live through this.

                                                 Here are twelve ways of knowing

                                               what blooms even in the blindness

                                                  of such longing. Yellow oxeye,

                                           viper’s bugloss with its set of pink arms

                                                      pleading do not forget me.

 

                                                     We hunger for eloquence .

                                                     We measure the isopleths.

                                         I am visiting my life with reckless plenitude.

                                          The air is fragrant with tiny strawberries.

                                            Fireflies turn on their electric wills:

                                            an effulgence. Let me come back

                                          whole, let me remember how to touch you

                                                         before it is too late.

  - Stacie Cassarino

 

 

A Murmuration of Starlings

 

 

Some Doves at Dusk

 

Created from data from the Magellan Spacecraft - apod.nasa.gov/

 

Space in Space - Sammy Atherton, 2nd