We Arrive Home After a Film
Whose beneficence this is, it’s difficult to say—
but when the inconsistent moon hoovers
in the sky and casts its ghostly light
on the two of us, we stand transfixed,
beside the car, still ticking and warm,
with the residue of imagined lives
on our faces. Everything has become holy:
the tar shingles on the barn, the furrowed
bark of the locust, misshapen by storm,
even the cement cover of the well.
Mere servants, we are unsure of our halos,
and something turns between us,
like a small Jupiter, spherical and solitary,
made entirely of vapors. Then silence:
the stars have exhausted themselves.
It is a gift, this light we hold in our lungs,
so we stand inside ourselves and wait,
beneath the sky’s brilliant tantrums.
(From Visible Heavens, Kent State University Press, winner of 2009 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize. Joanna Solfrian lives with her husband and daughters in northwestern Connecticut.)
