How clearly you can see some nights
So many stars like salt crystals
scattered on a tablecloth,
the seeming blankness of space,
but it isn’t—it is cities, filled, and history
rages its prayer wheel, spinning
loose chains as the bonfire sparks, flickers
the field, dismantling the evening into night,
too soon into daybreak. The two of you walk into the field
drunk and admiring. The two of you dismantle
the evening, drink, look up, stop,
look up, sway. Let the dear friend burning
from too much, lean against and into you,
and you both stagger under the weight
of the artifacts tattooed in their significance above,
tarot cards pointing back to the beast of the beginning.
We all should be naked, you think, allowing the fire to burn back
to some country of existence.
And your friend recalls himself as a child, and further,
when he died in a room in a warm, bright country,
and before, when he drank with other friends on shore,
boats, harbor-bright and pulling at their tethers,
and your friend is only words. He is scrawled,
black, expanding into the page.
And you, you wish he could love this mirror first—
the moon, the fire of an hour.
This dream you both walk in fires its lunar tongue,
the hour of your deaths, conceivable to him
but to you, an intemperate planet with no name,
and the day, today, you spent hiking in the woods, swimming
with these friends deforms, all of you distillations
of yourselves that will disappear
when you return home from this place where bonfires
order the night, and the Milky Way
is visible to you like it hasn’t been since you were a child,
and you want to know how the night collapsed,
how everything started falling away;
you’re trying to piece together the shores
of everyone before they started drifting back,
away from now, away from this place,
how you were just at the edge of the field.
-Katie Chaple
Read the Rumpus Review of Katie Chaple’s Pretty Little Rooms.
