Conspiracy Of Starlight
       

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Saturn is coming to power.

A street shaded by massive industrial trees scored with the names of high school sweethearts, arrows and dates, sealed with sap. But here are Saturn's initials, so freshly carved you can trace the kerf with your fingernail. Green pith still clings to the edge of the cut.

Saturn controls the banks. The usual bored tellers, licking their forefingers and counting, counting, counting. But whose is the name in gold letters, on the frosted window, behind the velvet rope?

Who runs the university now? Do the professors know, lost in hypothesis and proof, or the students, so certain the world is ending?

In church, isn't Christ's gaze a little fixed, in the high stained glass window?

Late at night I feel Saturn's touch. My lover's face, yes, kind, baffled, whispering my name, but the hand that reaches for me is remote as the night sky.

In subways, in museums, in the market, at a concert, elbows will jostle me, mouths may curse me, and all are anodyne, all mean no harm, except the one who denied my existence long before I was born.

Everything is swept away in the breath with which I mention it. The little shaded square with its stone benches, its padlocked Pentecostal church, its spotless Dominican bakery, the park with its indolent swings, its gritty sandbox—there! I've described them! Go to the window now. There will be nothing. At best a Caterpillar moving on long treads, a few workers in hard hats arguing over a blueprint—is this how you refute me? Give my voice the power to destroy?

2
Watch me rise, like the bright penny you lost in childhood.

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Copyright © 2021 D. Nurkse All rights reserved
from The Manhattan Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission