after William Stafford's "The Star in the Hills"

Emily Dickinson

after William Stafford’s “The Star in the

Hills”

drawing the line it’s the stuff inside

we like to make MINE

and claim an ownership though often

and soon it turns to tarnish
and rust with neglect, lazy in our giving

to care.  it seems the dust comes
to a pause on the etching
(if there is etching)

and the wire to keep everything

in it in and (or?) everything

in it out struts its stuff in the cold.  how true

the graveyard gate’s still

in its rust and still in its post

of granite, a pillar set

beside the church, another sort

of cornerstone, and the iron

squeaks when it needs to be

opened to those folks visiting the bones

of those they’ve known, (or the bones

are waiting to be visited)—those

clear lines once cut, the sod set

neatly aside and labled in the mind
of the gravedigger, to be placed
just so, so as to be knitted

back together when the fleshy
and boney puzzel’s

reclaimed, (look that word up, puzzel:
you'll see it's arcaic and means maiden
or virgin, and aren't we all that when
where laid
in the ground and when the living are gone

home, and the roots poke our noses
like worms into ourcool grave?)  maybe some

seed has been scattered.  or a tree’s

root ball cooled in the hole beside
the stone.  maybe

the chiseled name struck by hand

maybe the rock that flies up

just missing the eye…all a line

set to be straight but making an arc

instead and the man who could've
been made blind sees the stone
fly instead, and watches it hover
in the sky and sees it's venus.  or:
                         i’m thinking when a star

falls from the sky like it did in William

Stafford’s poem, in the state

of california, who drew the lines

(maybe he was standing in Oregon

when he saw it fall) three miles

out and into the ocean to make

their claim, to make posted

a guard (because who’s going

Elizabeth Bishop

to make off with a dead

star?)

he stands in the singe

the star made while it skidded

and burned out and wondered

maybe something similar:  the dead

are drawn in little boxes

and if it weren’t for them

being dead they’d have something

to say about their own bones
being made to trophies

being made to stretch out
like boundaries,

about how when they were living

and could remember back
when they were small

they could reach

the fence against the closest pasture

and look through to the ocean

or the hills and they didn’t know anything

about the hum of a chisel or a star
coming straight for them
or the electrified wire
or what was being kept

in or being kept out

so they grasped that wire and held it

and it held them and they fell

forcefully back letting go and the wire

kept some of them, that small dare

of palm-skin, though it was the wire’s dare

the line itself trilling: cross me!

grow up and cross me!  don’t

wait to be

shoved and shoveled

from one open gate

to another open gate. 

climb.  grease your hinge.  even after
you're taken you'll still be
brand new every time.  come
on! cross me!

aren’t you yet still alive?