“I really believe that at last the world is alive, indeed seething, and that the stimuli of these remarkable conjunctions did not act in vain.” – Johannes Kepler
You who found me out here—
tearing open, having broken
my blood-light vault into blue webs burning
through the foot of your serpent-bearer
in the crazed traffic of your earth’s October
sky—you who have just learned to stand
on the wet hills of Prague,
waiting for clouds to part
and frame the heavens you claim teeming,
you, who have never—
now you say you are my father.
You who believe
the hidden ellipse, the grace of the irregular path,
the world to be your story of light unfolding—
you thought that when you found me
I could be born.
You beheld a torch torn through the sky’s scrim
and gave me your name.
You wrote De Stella Nova. Signed me new.
You who pinned me to the map between Saturn and Mars
and fixed a trumpet in my shattered mouth
to herald your news
can’t feed me, can’t sing me to sleep.
I was not born between your stories, but shot through.
Not born of your eye, but sang unheard from each cold lash.
Yes, an ellipse can be a pure path.
And the universe is indeed
seething, butterflies and fleas proof that life sheds life.
Birth can be a kind of catastrophe: mine,
eons, a confusion of self unsleeving selves.
And catastrophe can be a kind of birth—
but Father, you
lift your small arms to me like a son. Father, I
am not new: not a breath, an egg, a ladder—
I collapse, neutron-bruised, into your heaven. Irregular
Father, I change, have changed
indeed—you see me seething but
what you see is past.
This sky-flower is not our flesh lit together.
Father, this is my body dying long ago.
–
Sally Rosen Kindred is the author of Book of Asters and No Eden; her most recent chapbook is Says the Forest to the Girl. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Gettysburg Review, Shenandoah, and Kenyon Review Online. She is a poetry editor for The Baltimore Review.