Star Diagram

Your body responds to its own discussion.
Beyond the milkyway trees' clean rasp, the moon
opens for you its little frozen door -- heat drums out.
Ghost animals, made vulnerable
by the sun, small signals of your death

held in whiteness, transcribe
old diseases. Clipped voices, seraphs
float through the yard. Countered, the night
succinctly informs there is no arrival. There is sleep's
injection. Once you said

you were held by the gaze
of a lion. Perhaps

it was the body's naming, a deciduous language,
Sycamore's mane of blanched apostrophes, primary's
irreparable manners of ochre, gold, vermilion. I am holding
to the palm of your hand

tracing
our last peninsula. I will not
lose. And so the stray light conducts
a secret joy, an absolute
cardinal direction. The self in all aspects
is the surface of anything, starfield's
constellation, skin remembers skin.