By D.A. Gray
Two men stand at the edge of a clearing,
looking up at the night sky, cloudless and still,
heavenly bodies never this present
in the light polluted world they’ve left,
searching for something – each hopes
to know it when he sees it
In the clearing the tall grass wears
a silvery sheen;,
behind them eyes are useless.
There’s a bullfrog whose voice provides
a low-toned undercurrent of song,
then stops its croaking and splashes into a pond.
There’s a breeze kicking up and chills them
having sweat in the humid air to reach this point.
The breeze carries the scent of lilac,
a trace of cow dung, a distant skunk.
The men are looking upward and one says,
‘North Star’ as if it needs to be announced,
but he’s thinking of a fixed and stable thing,
having moved from job to job each time
hoping for something that resembles permanence.
And the man beside him hears him, nods unseen
in the dark, thinks of something aloof, out of earshot.
He thinks of a child who would be an adult by now,
no longer here, and imagines an apathetic One
who’s left me here to bear this thought alone.
They’ve not stopped looking up,
both wanting to say something profound,
God or something. For years they’ve sat
in nearby pews, made small talk after service,
used, when they didn’t acknowledge, metaphor.
Even thought they spoke of the same thing.
Later they’ll talk about this sight over coffee, feeling
something about this flash of light unfinished.
At the moment it starts with one hand
on the shoulder of another, two men staring
upward at the same star, realizing that
neither has bothered to question what it signifies
before now.
D. A. Gray is the author of Contested Terrain (FutureCycle Press, 2017). His poems have appeared in The Sewanee Review, Still: The Journal, St. Katherine Review, Collateral Journal and Wrath-Bearing Tree among others. He earned his MFA at the Sewanee School of Letters. A native Kentuckian and a retired soldier, Gray now teaches, writes and lives in Central Texas.
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